Backlisted - The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

We are joined on this episode by authors Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad) and Nell Stevens (Briefly, A Delicious Life), who last featured on Backlisted #170 discussing North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. This time the talk turns on The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope, the third instalment of the Palliser sequence. We explore the ways in which this novel and Trollope’s work in general confound expectation at every turn, a surprise perhaps when one considers the author’s reputation as a spokesman for the establishment.  * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit backlisted.fm Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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See in-store for details. Is there anything better than curling up to read your book with a glass of wine? There is. Recording an episode of Backlisted with a glass of wine, which is normally what I do. But also, you might want to curl up to read your book with a free glass of wine. Luckily for you, Wine52 are offering all of our listeners not just a free glass, but a free case of wine. All you need to do is go to www.wine52.com forward slash backlisted and cover the postage costs of £9.95 and you'll get three bottles delivered to your door. I've been a member of Wine52 for a while now and I love it. Every month they showcase beautiful bottles of wine from across the world.

Your welcome case can be mixed, red only or white only. welcome case can be mixed red only or white only one of the whites included is a beautiful lucacia by agresti vini it's light crisp with fresh notes of gooseberry honeysuckle and jasmine also included is glug magazine which delves into each region's wine culture and two tasty snacks for you to enjoy after your free case you'll join the monthly wine club there's no minimum commitment it's not for you pause or cancel any time so remember that's www.wine52.com forward slash backlisted to claim your free case of delicious wine today Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today you find us on a summer's evening in Belgravia, London, in the mid-1860s. We're witnessing a society party

in the middle of the season, and a quadrille has just been called. A strikingly beautiful woman has ascended the stairs and entered the drawing room. A tall, slightly older man asks her to dance. The music starts,

and all eyes in the room are drawn to the blaze of jewels that adorn the woman's slender neck. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where people crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we are joined by two returning guests, Jennifer Egan and Nell Stephens. Welcome back to both.

Hello. Hello. Regular listeners will remember their wonderful double act on episode 170 last year, when the subject of discussion was Mrs. Gaskell's North and South. And it was a mark of how well that episode went, that neither party chose to speak exclusively for North or South. It was very much an exchange, a free and fair exchange. And at the end of that episode,

we enjoyed it so much. There was, like we always do, it's, oh, please come back. What would you like to talk about? And somebody, and I can't remember who, but I think it was Nell, maybe, said they would love to come back and talk about, of all people,

firebrand, revolutionary author, Anthony Trollope. And that's exactly what has happened. Let me do the introductions. Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels, including A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and was recently named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Her latest novel, The Candy House, a sibling to A Visit from the Goon Squad, was published in 2022 by Corsair in the UK and Scribner in the US, and was chosen by President Obama as one of his favorite books of the year. Jennifer, how did you find out that had happened?

Were you notified or did you stumble upon it? I was notified the moment it hit the internet because that's the world we live in. Yeah. And I was happy to see it, of course. Oh, my God. Of course. Incredible. Nell Stevens writes memoir and fiction. Her debut novel, Briefly, A Delicious Life, was published in 2022 by Picador in the UK and Scribner in the US. She is the author of Bleaker House and Mrs. Gaskell and Me, published as The Victorian and the Romantic in North America, which won the 2019 Somerset Norm Award. She was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2018, and she is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Warwick. creative writing at the University of Warwick. And to add a bit of suspense and tension, Nell,

to this entire episode recording, what might happen at any time in your house and the room in which you are recording? Well, I don't know if the listeners are going to be ready for it. The heat pump might come on. My wife might run a bath for our two-year-old, at which point a sort of god-awful droning will arrive, which is the sound of the hot water pump. I'm hiding in essentially the attic of our house, but that does mean that my companion here is the pump. So get rid of everybody. Well, like Alfred Hitchcock, we like to inject a note of tension into any bad listening recording for listeners.

Do you? Yes. You do now anyway. And that's part of my job, to make you feel as tense as I can before we start recording. John? Well, the Trollope novel that Jennifer and I have chosen to discuss is The Eustace Diamonds. First serialised in the Fortnightly Review in 20 instalments that ran from July 1871 to February 1873. And it was published in book form, a three-volume book form, in December 1872 by Chapman and Hall.

The Eustace Diamonds is the third novel in Trollope's six-volume Palliser series. Arguably. We'll come on to it. Arguably. I love that. I love that we're already we're already we're already hitting the canon for six yeah it's a the palace a series a detailed portrait of the lives and

mores of the aristocracy and upper middle classes in victorian england and the political legal and religious context in which they exist it centers this book centers on a young widow lizzie lady eustace and her attempt to hang on to a diamond necklace worth about half a million pounds in today's money, which she claims was given to her as a private love token by her husband Florian just before he died. This claim, like many others, spoiler alert, turns out to be a lie. And then the jewels go missing, presumed stolen. to be a lie. And then the jewels go missing, presumed stolen. Solving this apparent crime and its repercussions for Lizzie and the men and women she's involved in her machinations owes some of its contemporary appeal to the sensation novel and detective stories of writers like Wilkie Collins. But the real energy is Trollope's gift for social satire, which has

earned the book favourable comparisons with Thackeray's Vanity Fair. What is undeniable is that 150 years after it was written, Trollope's forensic exploration of gender and property, of a British empire already showing the signs of strain, and of the difficulty of ever using the law to determine the truth, it's as entertaining and relevant as ever. There will be plot spoilers during the discussion of this novel, but given it was published 150 years ago, the details have been in the public domain for some time. So let's begin our discussion in the usual place. Now let me ask you, when did you first read, encounter or hear about the Eustace Diamonds? I was an MA student at Birkbeck, one of the happiest years of my life. And I think I came to it via the Moonstone.

I was writing about diamonds, which was already a very fun topic for me. And then I read the Eustace Diamonds and I've never forgotten the good time I have with this book. It topic for me. And then I read the Eustace Simons. And I've never forgotten the good time I have with this book. It stayed with me. Was it the first Trollope you'd read? I think I'd read Barges to Towers in graduate school in the US. It had not made a great impression. I was in that period of kind of reading everything too quickly, and it hadn't really landed. And then, for that reason, was slightly reluctant, I I think to go back to Trollope and then read the Eustace Simons and was just delighted by the storytelling and have subsequently gone back and corrected my misapprehension about Trollope. Yes we'll come on to misapprehensions about Trollope in a moment I'll ask my colleague about them but Jennifer let me turn to you and say, when did you first read Anthony

Trollope? I had read a single volume, Castle Richmond, sometime, I don't know, maybe 20 years ago. I was kind of unimpressed. But then my mother was strongly recommending, we both love audiobooks. And she was just saying, I'm lost in these series. You have to read Trollope, you have to read Trollope. So I started at the beginning with The Warden, the beginning of the series, the two great series. And I read them in order. Or rather, I should say, David Shaw Parker read them to me in order. And I was so enamored of his reading that I wrote him a fawning fan letter that I think

was so over the top that he didn't even answer it. And when I told a friend of mine what I had said in the letter, he said, Jenny, not only am I not surprised he didn't respond, I think it's lucky he didn't take out a restraining order. Anyway, so I

read the Barsetshire series and then the Pallister series, and I read the Eustace Diamonds in the order in which it appeared in those series. And I've actually taught Barchester Towers in a literature course to undergrads here in America at the University of Pennsylvania. So I know that book quite well. Okay, John, I'm going to ask you for once, when did you first read Anthony Trollope? I first read Anthony Trollope, I mean a long time ago when I was a student, I think I read Butchers of Towers and quite liked it. And then Trollope was pigeonholed in my quite liked, but no serious intention came to this, I have to say,

just delicious book. I've just had the most fun. I know I always say that, you know, why have I not read more Trollope? But I am now completely addicted and will have to, whatever order they come in, I'm going to have to do all the palaces at the very least because it's so much, I don't know, it's so much richer and more interesting than I was expecting it to be.

I read Trollope for the first time when I was at school because I had to do The Warden and Barchester Towers for A-level and I really hated them. The only novel I hated more for my A-level was Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Please don't, anyone listening, don't take that as a prompt to make me read it again for this. Thanks very much.

But I came back to Trollope a few years ago. First, I read The Way We Live Now, which I really enjoyed. And then during the early months of COVID, I reread The Warden and barchester towers and then the rest of the barchester chronicles and i absolutely loved them i absolutely love them i find it hard to think of a writer you know it was wasted on me because a 16 year old and it was an absolute delight and balm and comfort and all those other things as a you know 50 something so i i was delighted when you both came up with this plan to to bring trollop to batlisted. And I want to give I want to a shout out to our producer, Nikki Birch, who Nikki Birch.

What was the first Anthony Trollope novel you read? The Eustace Diamonds. And my mother, who who died a couple of years ago, has a bookshelf full of Anthony Trollope. So I've always wanted to. So this was really a really good moment for me because I finally got around to reading Trollope and I feel like I kind of

I understand her a little bit more. So thank you very much, Nell and Jenny. Jennifer, who was the reader of your audio books? David Shaw Parker. And he actually, at a certain point, I had to pause in my reading because he hadn't finished reading The Palliser series. point I had to pause in my reading because he hadn't finished reading

the Palliser series so I had to wait for the Duke's children and I was so impatient I mean these are long books I mean I'm sure the guy has other things he's doing I like to think you bombarded David Shaw Parker with with emails saying hurry hurry up. What's wrong with you? By that time, I felt I had already sort of burned that bridge. So I stayed quiet. But I did compliment him on Twitter. And that, I think, was a little more of a neutral environment. He was more comfortable responding. But, you know, one thing I just would say, you know, I think there's a feeling here among people who read Trollope, and by here I mean America, that he sort of got a certain kind of American type, the kind of shameless, you know, never apologize, never explain. And of course, that type is, you know, embodied in Donald Trump. So I think Trollope has felt more relevant here.

That's so interesting. I very much enjoyed reading The Useless Diamonds with the assistance of a different reader of Trollope, Timothy West, the actor Timothy West, whose audiobooks are available over here. Nikki, I think you did the audio as well, didn't you? Yeah, I did. Yeah, the same reading. It was fabulous.

It was 25 hours long. Fantastic. He manages to get laughs where I don't even know laughs were meant to land, but not in an inappropriate way. Oh, I'm just so curious about these experiences we had as young people with Trollope. Yeah. Being so uniformly negative or at least underwhelmed. And I'm just so intrigued by what it is about Trollope that when you revisit later is more moving. And also secondary question,

whether if we'd been given the Eustace Diamonds, age 16 or 20, whether we would still have been kind of turned off by it or whether there's something about this novel that might have excited a younger reader, even though it's Trollope. You know, I felt when I assigned Artister Towers to my undergrads

that this was going to land like an explosion of joy because it's, you know, he's the great serialist. He made series of series and we're obsessed with television series. And that book has such memorable characters and it's all about sexuality. I was like, come on. I mean, this is going to start a kind of viral Trollope phenomenon in America right in this classroom. This is amazing.

It did not really happen. I'm sorry to say. I like the concept, Jennifer, that that trollop didn't only invent the post box but also the dvd box set that's a new wrinkle on it i i would like to respond to nell's question um i think had i read the useless diamonds i probably still would have struggled with it i think you're right i would have enjoyed the kind of melodrama of it, or at least the fact that there was some melodrama. I mean, the warden was sort of much too gentle for me then, and now, of course, soothingly gentle. John, what do you think? Would you have enjoyed this? It's a heist book, isn't it? It's a heist book. It's brilliant. We were talking about the Maltese Falcon and MacGuffins, this necklace, it's the most brilliant MacGuffin ever invented. It's like,

what is the necklace? Why does she love it so much? Why does she want to have it so much? And I have to say, for people who like inside kind of, you know, language coming from outside, Dove, the guy, the lawyer who gives the legal opinion, which I know that Trollope went to great lengths to get a really senior lawyer to write, that judgment on whether or not the necklace, the Eustace diamonds of the title, can be accounted an heirloom

and therefore should stay with the family, or is paraphernalia. Yes, paraphernalia is the word, yes. Isn't that the most amazing thing about this novel, though, that it is a sensation novel with a long legal opinion written within it, and yet I'm gripped when I read that dove letter. It really reminds me of when you're following, you know, every now and then you get a proper showbiz trial

and you can read the live feed on The Guardian and I become briefly a legal expert i have that with this book and with the dove letter one of the things about this novel i think is great is it contains multitudes you think you know what you're going to get you think you're going to get the the trilopian drollery and it manages to include all sorts of other voices and textures and set pieces and um of which one as you say is the sensation novel sensation novels being a kind of terribly voguish thing in the 1860s and 70s weren't they wilkie collins the moonstone melodrama as a texture but but also backed up with some

degree of social realism and you can see that kind's what Trollope is heading for here. We've got an audio clip. If you're of a certain age, you may remember that the BBC serialised the Palliser novels following on from the Foresight saga in the early 1970s, adapted in 26 episodes by Simon Raven. Simon Raven included in his account of the Pallisers the Eustace Diamonds, even though Anthony Trollope said it wasn't part of the sequence.

So we will come back to that in a moment. But you may recognize a couple of the voices in this clip um and it may well remind you of one or two other television programs from that era flora you should not speak of your brother as if he were a piece of cannon i speak of my brother as i see him seventh lord fawn of fawn court entitled to respect from all courtiers, which mother he is not at the moment receiving. Now, since no one else is prepared to act, it is up to me, as his eldest and only married sister,

to take matters in hand. Now then, Patrick. Yes, Carla. First, let us establish the exact situation. Are you or are you not engaged to Lady Eustace? Well, I... I don't know. You don't know?

Well, you see, our engagement was conditional upon her behaving properly about this diamond. Well, what... Well, she hasn't. And since the second robbery, she refuses to assist the police, it appears. And on top of all that, she is living near Shepherd Market

with a highly peculiar woman. Oh, no, Clara, really, I say... Well, then, all, Frederick, you need not. For the credit of the that, she is living near Shepherd Market with a highly peculiar woman. Oh, Clara, really, I say. Well, then, all, Frederick, you need not. For the credit of the family, you must not consult any further with Lady Eustace. So much for her. The thing to be settled now is whom you shall consult. Don't you think, Clara dear, that Frederick might like to decide that for himself? If we leave it to Frederick, Mama, he will either marry disaster or die an old maid. So, Frederick, you need someone more respectable than Lady Eustace. Yes, indeed, but...

But you also need someone with her kind of money. Well, more if possible. You have a widowed mother to maintain and seven sisters for whom to find diaries. Very large diaries, they will need. Well, you did not have very much, Clara, dear, but I suppose you had other means of persuasion. General Hittaway saw that I was not to be trifled with,

if that is what you mean. Apart from all that, there's corncob to keep up and record the compassion. There must be more money, Frederick, and it is your duty to marry it. Oh, there we go. Well, it's all on YouTube, everyone. And it's absolutely wonderful.

Madeline Christie as Lady Fawn, Derek Jackby as Lord Fawn, and in full Margot Ledbetter mode, Penelope Keith as Mrs. Hittaway. So the scene that we heard there was to do with Lord Fawn seeking to marry Lady Eustace for her money. What is going on in this novel in terms of the balance between making a lucrative match and making a socially acceptable one. Jennifer. Well, I mean, it seems like in a way that is the entire subject of the novel, that we live in a world now where people can be evaluated in terms of their assets, in all senses of that word.

And what is possible for them is a direct result of the combined value of those assets. So Lord Fawn has a title and some power in government, but he's very poor. He has to find some money. Lizzie Eustace has money because of her very brief marriage to a wealthy man. And she's very beautiful. So Lord Fawn makes a very clear calculation that this is a good idea

for him. They've exchanged about two words and become engaged. And then immediately there are problems because Lord Fawn, who has investigated her finances fully and found those to be acceptable, has been unaware of a certain brewing controversy about this set of diamonds that she won't relinquish, but that don't really belong to her. To me, one of the great pleasures of this book, which has a very dark side, but the pleasures are in watching Fawn and Lizzie fall apart before there was anything really built between them because they're both so ridiculous. But he especially, I'm just going to read a tiny little quote that really kind of gets at the whole thing. The one was conversant with things in general, but was slow. That's fawn.

The other was quick as a lizard in turning hither and thither, but knew almost nothing. In regard to honesty, the man was superior to the woman because his purpose was declared, and he told no lies. But the one was as mercenary as the other. So it's just a delight to watch them butt heads. And I will add, she masters him every time. I mean, Lord Fawn, he's described as quaking, quavering, quailing. He's just so hilarious.

And now Trollope sets up a kind of battle of equals there. How do you feel about his portrayal of... This is such a strange thing to say, but this is a weirdly progressive novel and yet a reactionary one at the same time, right? That's exactly the portrayal of Izzy, right? She is constantly described as clever everybody says how clever she is and yet there are so many instances of like a woman or you know

she doesn't reply to letters that she doesn't like like a woman that's actually turns out to be a really smart tactic it completely befuddles them right but um she doesn't understand whether or not the money is hers or does she? And what's so tantalizing about it and what stops you from wanting to throw the book across the room is that you kind of get the sense that Lizzie's in on it the whole time. That Lizzie doesn't want to completely understand the particulars of what she's been left by her late husband. And she doesn't want people to know if she does understand or not. And she's walking that line just as much as Trollope is, whilst also being the absolute kind of epitome of this horribly underestimated female character

that we know from Victorian fiction. She's just an amazing character, I think. Sean, does Trollope like her, do you think? I think the tension and the joy of this book is he doesn't know, he doesn't like her on one level, but he loves writing her. He loves, this is the most extreme book at the moment that I can think of, of where a character gets away with things that the author clearly doesn't like. But you know what it made me think of? It's like Shakespeare creating Iago.

It's like he creates something, he doesn't really understand what's motivating Lizzie. He kind of puts in stuff, but she just is, she's just he creates something. He doesn't really understand what's motivating Lizzie. He kind of puts in stuff. But she's just unstoppable life force and is the heart of the book. One thing that's striking is that the narrator is really hard on her right from the beginning in a way that's kind of shocking. I mean, a couple pages in, as she was utterly devoid of true tenderness. So also was she devoid of conscience? This is an omniscient narrator talking about his protagonist. It's like talk about, you know, potentially alienating the reader.

But it almost comes to feel as the book goes on that the narrator is trying to convince himself that she is not worthy of his attention. And yet, of course, is riveted by her just as we are. Can I jump in and read the opening line? Because it speaks to this so beautifully. This is probably one of my favorite opening lines ever. It's a pair of opening lines. I love them so much. So this is the chapter one, Lizzie Greystock. It was admitted by all her friends and also by her enemies who were in truth the more numerous and active body of the two that Lizzie Greystock had done very well with herself. We will tell the story of Lizzie Greystock from the beginning,

but we will not dwell over it at great length as we might do if we loved her. at great length, as we might do if we loved her. Cue hundreds of pages, right? We don't love her, and yet we will dwell on it because we do love her. It's right there, just in that extraordinary opening. We ought to explain a bit more about Lizzie and who she is. On one level, she is a sort of Becky Sharp figure, right, from Vanity Fair by Thackeray.

She is an adventuress and a social climber. And the idea is that she set out to marry her way to the top, right? Please contradict me if you think I'm being unfair to her. Yeah, I mean, he describes her as a Becky Sharp, right?

Early on, we get that comparison. She's definitely bad, certainly in her context. She's not evil. She's selfish. And she'll do whatever it takes to serve her self-interest. And that results in behavior that is just outlandish for a female in her time. She wants power. And to my mind, that really was Trollope's great subject

always was power in all of these, whether it's, you know, clerical hierarchy in the Bursitzscher series or actual, you know, government and the Palliser series. But women had almost no power at that time. So some of his most memorable characters, certainly Lizzie, are women who are seeking power and wielding power in the very few ways that they could, which almost always result in these extreme kind of characterizations that are almost like distortions of what a woman is supposed to be like. But they're so much fun. supposed to be like but they're so much fun the thing that's so compelling to me about lizzie is that she actually has a lot of power and nobody does more to undermine it than she does and that's what makes the novel so propulsive is you know from quite early on you're just screaming at the page just give up the bloody diamonds you're so rich and all these people want to marry you. And this is the thing that's going to be your undoing.

And she can't. She can't. And it speaks again to that sort of tension between she's very clever and she doesn't understand things in part, I suppose. But that's what makes her so good to me and makes her feel really modern to me. That this kind of the way that we write character of tv characters now is the most important thing about tv characters they have to be the agent of their own downfall that's lizzie eustace you know she's not a mastermind exactly as nell says like she's

she's not picking the right battles she thinks that somehow by holding on to these diamonds she's winning but in fact she, really loses in the end. She doesn't lose to the degree that she could have. She's not in jail, but she essentially falls in class, which in the world of this book is a really big deal. So she pays an enormous price, actually. It's such a bad choice. And yet she digs in her heels and she won't let go. So I agree totally with Nell. She would be much less sympathetic if she kind of robotically and successfully controlled everything. Yeah. I just want to read you an extract and ask you to comment on this is from

a wonderful essay by Christoph Lindner called Trollope's Material Girl, which is a comparative study of the Eustace Diamonds and Material Girl, My Madonna. And it's genuinely enlightening and fascinating and witty. And I just want to read you one paragraph and ask you to comment on it, because it seemed to me a very good extrapolation of this idea of Trollope's ambivalence, isn't the word, but he doesn't

know quite where to sit as a narrator in relation to Lizzie. Anthony Trollope's novel of mercenary female duplicity, The Eustace Diamonds, is a case in point. Like Madonna's Material Girl, The Eustace Diamonds highlights the interplay between sexual politics and consumerism. In particular, I wish to argue, Trollope's writing examines, challenges and experiments with commodity cultures' economic constructions of the feminine. It assesses the consequences of exploiting and manipulating those constructions in the self-serving pursuit of materialist pleasure and it investigates women's potential to capitalize at a material level on the commodification of feminine identity and its

constituent parts. The result is that Trollope's writing projects images of women that appear simultaneously to subvert and revive the dominant sexual politics of 19th century commodity culture. And ultimately, it allows its representation of the feminine to be recuperated back into the very categories that the novel itself paradoxically calls into question. I mean, I think that's rather wonderful if you can decode the academic ease in which it's written, which is he's basically saying he's trapped with her. He doesn't know, is he seeking to lampoon her or is he seeking to celebrate her agency, as we would say now?

I wonder what we think about that. Is Trollope failing as a satirist in that respect? Sure. I want to say happily, yes. Right. It's so wonderful that he fails as a satirist with Lizzie Eustace. And that's what makes me love the portrayal. In some ways, it's quite uneven this novel and you know we get this extreme humor and then these moments of really beautiful psychological realism where your heart kind of breaks for her can i read a little section where suddenly we're taking her very very seriously she's just been accosted in the street um by her sort of enemy enemy lawyer who's demanding the diamonds and she sets off for

the train station with the locked box with the diamonds under her feet. In her sobbing she felt the thing under her feet and knew she could not get rid of it. She hated the box and yet she must cling to it now. She was thoroughly ashamed of the box, and yet she must seem to take a pride in it. She was horribly afraid of the box, and yet she must keep it in her own very bedroom. That to me feels like Elliot, you know, in the kind of immense empathy for the character and the absolute pinpointing of the horrible predicaments that she has got herself in. Lizzie ultimately is part of a larger system that he's satirizing. And so in a way, we can't just look at her on her own. There are many other people who participate in this. And many of them also have their moments of, as you were saying now,

pesos and kind of real emotion. But to me, where he fails as a satirist is in never really questioning class. Because what he's saying is, you know, we live in this mercenary world where everyone is striking bargains. We know everyone's salary. I mean, I find myself imagining in contemporary fiction, I was thinking, I want to try this. The first thing we know about every character is how much they make a year. It's crazy. It's so weird. So he's indicting all of that and the way that everyone participates in it. And yet, in the end, the only people who are really seriously punished are people who are not of the upper classes. And so in that way, he's not thinking widely enough to really satirize the world that he's part of. In the end, he feeds right back into it, both with extremely anti-Semitic tropes, which are vivid in this book and very unpleasant to encounter, and bring it down, as all stereotypes do, not just morally, but aesthetically. They just aren't good. But also by, you know, ultimately sort of Lizzie falls down a notch and the book concludes with the extreme elite

sort of talking about her, gossiping about her, but she's sort of gone. So I guess that's the way in which to me the satire feels incomplete. Can you speak then in the context of that, Jenny, about Lucy Morris? Well, Lucy Morris is an interesting exact opposite and counterpoint to Lizzie Eustace, and much less interesting to read about. And I think that the fact that we are bringing her up only now kind of says it all. She's a sap. Just for a break.

Just for a break from talking about Lizzie. Yeah. She's true blue. She loves. Good as gold. She lives by her word. She is a completely honest person who is not obsessed with surfaces, is not even that attractive, doesn't notice when people are attractive. So she doesn't participate in that system at all. And she actually wins in

this book. She gets the guy, even though, I mean, you got to question whether she would even want him after his complete spinelessness. But there are also some real moments of pathos about her because there does come a moment when she recognizes that he has wandered, Frank Greystock, her beloved, he has wandered to Lizzie, his cousin, and she sort of glimpses herself in this material way and sees that she, in this system of value, she has nothing to offer and that she's empty handed. And that's a really brutal moment. The men are all pretty hopeless in this book, let's be honest.

And although he has promising moments, and maybe the most interesting thing about him is that he kind of gets off on on he gets off on lizzie's wildness there's this lovely bit kind of three quarters of the way through where he's he's just admiring her chutzpah and and says you know going and robbing a bank is sort of this again the classist thing you know only idiots would do that but walking into a bank and getting them to give you all your money and then walking out again, that takes. That's a great feat, he said.

And she, encouraging him, says, do you really think so? And he says, the courage, the ingenuity, and the self-confidence needed are certainly admirable. Then there is a cringing and almost contemptible littleness about honesty, which hardly allows it to assert itself. The really honest man can never say a word to make those who don't know his honesty believe that it's there. He has one foot in the grave before his neighbours have learned that he is possessed of an article for the use of which they would so willingly have paid, could they have been made to see it,

that it was there. The dishonest man almost doubts whether in him dishonesty is dishonest. Let it be practiced ever so widely. I love this. The honest man almost doubts whether his honesty be honest unless it be kept hidden. Let two unknown men be competitors for any place with nothing to guide the judges but their own words and their own looks. And who can doubt that the dishonest man would be chosen rather than the honest? Honesty goes about with a hangdog look about him, as though knowing that he cannot be trusted till he be proved. Dishonesty carries his eyes high and assumes that any question respecting him must be considered to be unnecessary. Oh, Frank, what a philosopher you are. Oh, Frank, what a philosopher you are.

I mean, that is kind of, you know, that's the world we live in, right? That is definitely Trollope being as relevant 150 years ago as he is now today. That idea that if you kind of have a swagger and you're dishonest, even the law gets swayed by that. If only there were a recent British Prime Minister who, Even the law gets swayed by that. If only there were a recent British Prime Minister who, furthermore, a Tory Prime Minister, much loved of the Conservative politicians, as Trollope undoubtedly is.

Yes, Nell, sorry. No, just I was struck reading it that it is such an extraordinary study in brazen, right? It seems the things that compel me are the pettiness and the self-destruction of pettiness, but also the power and success of brazenness, right? That quote you just read, John, reminds me of another bit that I really liked

and pulled out from right at the end where Lizzie's sort of pondering what she's learned over the course of her journey. And she says she liked lies, thinking them to be more beautiful than truth. So she's sort of in the realm of poetry. But then she says, to lie readily and cleverly, recklessly and yet successfully, was, according to the lessons she had learned, a necessity in woman and an added grace in man. It's so hard not to think of our politics and our politicians.

It's also this lesson that I felt like I was learning for the first time now in how successful brazenness can be and the armor that brazenness is, but Trollope knew it. Yeah. And that the essence of brazenness is not apologizing. Like all the all the rules we've been taught about how to be a good human being and a polite human being don't apply. And what we see is people winning by doing exactly the opposite. And it does feel so relevant. Oh, my God. I mean, we spend we're still talking every day in America. I can't even believe it all these years later about how does Trump get away with it? That's the question we ask constantly because he did lose the presidency, but he's now being multiply indicted and raising money off of it. And he's he's on our front page every single day. So it really does feel like he's he's Lizzie Eustace in male form with actual worldly power to wield. Also, I would say Trollope's ambivalence to Lizzie is also ambivalence to lying, because I think there's a kind of equivalency for Trollope. The characters

who lie most extravagantly for Trollope are those who are most alive. You have to put it in the context of class. Liars who are not aristocrats are not interesting. Lizzie's maid, Patience Crabstick, what a name, is not interesting. She's just a minor character of low class who's a crook. And there are several of these in the book, actually. They're not that compelling. So that's why I think class is such an important element of this conversation that Trollope himself, I think, was unaware of, the ways in which he was reaffirming the rules about value and class being a real thing. So lying is great if the person lying is an aristocrat. It's really just what you would expect if the person is low class. Summer is like a cocktail. It has to be mixed

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Benefits vary by card. Terms apply. One of the things I felt about reading this novel was one of the reasons why perhaps it's not as widely discussed as it could be or should be is it's slightly swamped by being included in the palace of sequence, when in fact Trollope himself said the palace of sequence consisted of, can you forgive her, Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, and the Prime Minister. It's only in relatively the last 50

years or so people have begun to think of the Eustace Diamonds and to some extent the Duke's Children, which is the final installment, as part of the canon, as it were, of this series of novels. I was pleasantly surprised about how I didn't need to do much background reading to pick up the Eustace Diamonds and be pitched straight into it. The main characters of the Pallister series are really, they almost just function as a kind of Greek chorus in the background commenting on the action. There are definitely other books in both series in which we really go off on tangents. And to me, that's so inherent in a serialized approach to storytelling. And again, we accept that in television readily that, okay, this character is coming into focus this season. It didn't feel out of place to me. I guess that's what I'm saying.

Do you think there was an element, this idea of lying and honesty that, because Trollope, you know, Trollope's biography is interesting, isn't it? He comes from a, he comes from a kind of a, his dad was a sort of failure making money you know jennifer's point making money was really really important to him and at the end of his life and you know his autobiography is just is pretty dull it's just basically about how i how i made money being a writer without telling you anything much about anything that he felt about anything all of the interesting stuff goes into the novels and do you i mean he wondered almost that his his him being easy on lying is because that's what he you know

that writing is a form of lying isn't it's a form of make a form of make-believe it's a form of making stuff up it's a form of creating stuff that that that that may or may not map onto reality he's just i just find I found this book so interesting in its psychological kind of instability. You don't really, in spite of himself, he finds himself unable to condemn the people who he would think. And he makes those characters live on the page.

I think it's also worth thinking about, I mean, if power was his great subject, which I really think it's also worth thinking about I mean if if power was his great subject which I really think it was I I think that the most interesting work he did was around women because their avenues to power were so few and I think you have to you have to know a little about his mom to really understand that I mean Fanny Trollope was an extraordinary figure. And she came to America when Trollope was 12. She brought their three youngest children and had a crazy series of misadventures that almost got them killed more than once. And this was in the 1820s. It was really early.

with her tail between her legs, but not really, because she's already writing this vicious portrait of life in America, the domestic manners of the Americans, which is a scathing indictment of which reads bizarrely apt even now, I'm sorry to say as an American. And she becomes a huge bestseller and ends up supporting the family as a travel writer. So he grew up in a family in which female power saved the day and scrappy ingenuity was the source of that power. And I feel that in all of his work so strongly. Before I read any Trollope, Trollope, I read Fanny Trollope. So in graduate school, but before we got to Bartender Towers. And I think I've only just now,

I knew that obviously they were related, and yet I've only just now put those two things together and it makes so much sense. Doesn't it make so much sense? She was also very funny. domestic manners of americans is hilarious i mean she talks about how americans are like spearing their meat with their knives it's so vivid the eating from the knife which i read also expat in the u.s kind of looking around me thinking what is going on but she also calls out slavery and the double standard, the grotesque ways in which slave owners bore children with their slaves and then enslaved

them. I mean, she was all over the hypocrisy and the meanness that she saw in American life. And, you know, I think she was a little harsh, but, you know, but she laughed all the way to the back and wrote many, many books after that. And his father, as I understand it, really experienced almost a depression. I think what we would call now a kind of mental challenge. And you see a lot of that in Trollope also. So I've got here a description from, and I would like to comment on this, please. This is from the Encyclopedia Britannica, and this is how they opened their entry on Anthony Trollope. Anthony Trollope, born April the 24th, 1815, London, England, died December the 6th, 1882, London. English novelist whose popular success

concealed until long after his death the nature and extent of his literary merit. Trollope was very successful in his day and forgotten to history until probably the 1950s. Why? He was dismissed as a kind of a popular writer. He was seen as the sort of poor man's version of Balzac or Zola or...

Well, isn't he dismissed now to some extent? He was much thought of as a sophisticated writer in his day and seems now to be what? Some kind of, you you know Tory yarn maker rather than a psychologically complex novelist. I probably you know I probably said this in relation to Gaskell as well but I'll keep banging this drum we get really confused by humour I think. We don't know how to understand humour alongside intellectually rigorous writing. And we either do it by ignoring the humour

or just letting someone be a comic novelist or, you know, it's entertaining and it's vicarages and it's a certain kind of shuffling Englishness or shambolic Englishness and it gets relegated because he's so funny. I think we get confused by that. My theory of the case doesn't really work around Dickens. Somehow we allow Dickens to be everything in a way that we don't let Trollope be everything. But that would be part of why I think we don't know how to talk about it. I think another element, well, first of all,

a lot of people in America don't even know who Trollope is. So I don't know if I can even characterize. I'm not sure he has a reputation here. The whole is always greater than the sum of the parts with his books. I think that's one reason he was such a great serial creator. Series of series of series. Each book was a series. The books create a series. And then those two series are part of a kind of larger series. But the more one reads of Trollope, the more the genius becomes really manifest, I think. And I'm just not sure people want to put in the work to do that, even though they'll happily watch many, many hours of serialized television that functions

structurally and in its storytelling modes much the same way. And that's so frustrating to me. I really can't figure out why this message is so hard to get across. But, you know, he's he benefits from being read in bulk. And maybe people just don't want to read anything in bulk nowadays. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So listen, we normally do some biographical information on our beach door. So we're going to do that today. We're going to do it in the form of a true or false quiz. I'm going to read you a fact about Anthony Trollope, each of you, and you have to tell me if it's true or false. And I'll start with my colleague, John Mitchinson,

because I feel sure he will be able to expand upon this one. We all know, John, that Anthony Trollope, in his job at the post office, invented the post box. Is it true that post boxes were originally painted green, but in 1874 they were changed to red to stop people bumping into them? That is exactly true. It is true. It is true, yeah.

That they were seen because green sort of, because, you know, trees are green and grass is green, they've seemed to blend in more. And people, because they kept, I think it's hard to imagine now how many of these things sprung up over quite a concentrated period. And there were lots and lots of anecdotal evidence that people were bumping into them and, you know, injuring themselves. So, yes, true fact. True fact. Thank you very much.

Jennifer, Anthony Trollope rose at 5.30 every morning and he would write for three hours before going off to that job at the post office, and he would never revise. True or false? I don't know about the revising. I think the schedule is true. It is true, yes. And reputedly, he never revised. Huh, that's interesting. I think you can tell in a couple of parts of The Use of Diamonds. I'm just going to come out and say it. My sense is that he was somewhat disrespected because of his routine, that he was so routinized in his methodology that people saw that as a little too far from, you know, awaiting the muses and having them sing to him.

However, I take my hat off to the guy to have a thriving postal career and write a bunch of novels. That's amazing. 47 novels. Yeah, yeah. It's just insane. Yeah.

He wrote 250 words every 15 minutes and would pace himself with a watch. He's a monster. Let's be clear. Tolstoy, Nell. Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy, said of Trollope, Mr. Trollope kills me with his excellence,

true or false? If he didn't say it, he should have said it. I want to say true. It is true. Trollope's admirers over the years have included Queen Victoria, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Tolstoy, and indeed Henry James, who bumped into him on a transatlantic crossing and was appalled that Trollope curtailed their conversation to go off and get his 250 words done in 15 minutes. He was an absolute machine.

Nikki, Nikki, I've got an Anthony Trollope question for you now. Around the house, Trollope insisted people call him Tony. Tony Trollope, true or false? Everything else has been true. So I'm going to say false just by that. Also, he doesn't seem like a Tony As far as we know it's false But I'm going to refer to him exclusively

As Tony Trollope From here on in I believe that's not true I've got a couple more here Just because they're fun John, true or false Anthony Trollope's final published novel is set in the year 1980 and in it euthanasia is introduced for all inhabitants of the british isles at the age of

67 um i'm going to say true because i there's something in that story that just kind of absolutely reminds me it's just triggered some memory in my head. It's true. It's an early example of a dystopian novel called The Fixed Period. And finally, I'll open this to everyone. The cause of Trollope's death was reading a comic novel, true or false? It's got to be true. It's obviously true.

Who would make that up as a falsity? I don't know. What was he reading? What was the novel? Do you know what the novel was? Trollope died shortly after laughing uproariously at F. Anstey's comic novel, Vice Versa. He laughed so hard he had a stroke and died a month later.

Well, that's a good way to go, in my opinion. That makes me like him even more. I'm still processing 250 words in 15 minutes. It's just going to take me a long time to come to terms with that. So that's like a typed page, right? Something like that? Yeah. Well, I think, Jennifer, you're right, though. I think that is one of the things that we generally know about Trollope. We know how productive he was. We know he wrote 40-blah novels, plays, journalism. We know, and if anything, it has, and as John suggested in

his autobiography, he was keen to emphasize the quantity rather than the quality. But that has militated against his reputation. It did certainly in the years after his death. rather than a novelist of a certain psychological insight or one who can entertain very dark themes within the books. That may be. I also think he wrote in very nuanced ways about power, but I think he has some weaknesses. You don't see a lot of, I don't know, sometimes the emotional relationships, like the real emotional relationships, feel a little harder for him to, or maybe he just wasn't as interested in them, but example, she really does it all. And I think there are things that

don't happen in his books that do happen in, for example, Middlemarch. I don't miss them at all, because I think he brings so much to his subject that I don't feel anything missing. But maybe people are looking for something that isn't what he was interested in. And yet, where is the darkness in The Useless Diamonds? Because it does get pretty dark, doesn't it? Oh, my God. of transactional relationships, let's say, in which people are valued by through some sort of algorithmic combination of their assets and they interact accordingly. There is one relationship in which the horrifying underside of that is really laid bare. And that is between Lucinda

Rono, who's a kind of who's a young, or at least raised in America, woman with her aunt, who's on the lookout for a husband, and Sir Griffin Tewitt, who proposes to her. And they hate each other. And the relationship that they end up in is kind of clearly sadomasochistic. relationship that they end up in is kind of clearly sadomasochistic. And I'm just going to read a little bit about Lucinda's state of mind before she's even proposed to. These are side characters, but they have a fairly major role. They are all visiting Lizzie Eustace at her castle in Scotland. And so this is Lucinda contemplating her situation. It was no doubt necessary that she should do something. Her fortune, such as it was, would soon be spent in the adventure of finding a husband. She also had her ideas about love and had enough of

sincerity about her to love a man thoroughly. But it had seemed to her that all the men who came near her were men whom she could not fail to dislike. She was hurried here and hurried there and knew nothing of real social intimacies. As she told her aunt in her wickedness, she would almost have preferred a shoemaker if she could have become acquainted with a shoemaker in a manner that should be unforced and genuine. There was a savageness of antipathy in her to the mode of life which her circumstances had produced for her. It was that very savageness which made her ride so hard and which forbade her to smile and be pleasant to people whom she could not like. And yet she knew that something must be done. hard, and which forbade her to smile and be pleasant to people whom she could not like. And yet she knew that something must be done. She could not afford to wait as other girls might do.

Why not Sir Griffin as well as any other fool? It may be doubted whether she knew how obstinate, how hard, how cruel to a woman a fool can be. And, you know, that's before he proposes. And once he does, you know, it just gets crazier and uglier. I mean, she talks about wanting to break her neck riding horses. She talks about murdering him and says she thinks she might. And, you know, the thing that's always pretty absent from Trollope books, and really, I guess, all novels written at the time,

which is sex, comes through as this absolutely horrifying possibility. I mean, when Tewit kisses her, she talks about it as pollution, a sense of real toxic impurity around that she's she recoils from him physically so it's pretty ugly um now this idea of trollop as um someone who would like to be jocular but can't help himself from doing all these other things, seems quite strong to me.

I agree with Jennifer completely. This novel is constantly pushing into unexpected zones of emotion and psychological insight and political nous and refuses to be contained by that kind of droll tone of voice. Well, unfortunately, that is where we're going to have to leave things. And a huge thanks again to Jennifer and Nell for giving us finally the excuse to talk about the joys and the rewards and the unexpectedness of the trilopian universe.

And obviously to you, Nicky, for helping us sound like we're all singing from the same oral hymn sheet If you would like show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 188 that we've already recorded please visit our website at

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listener level for about the same amount as it costs frank grace dr hire a scottish pony you'll get two extra exclusive podcasts every month we call it lock listed because it began in the wenlock tavern just before lockdown and it features the three of us talking and recommending the books films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. People who subscribe at this level get their names read out, accompanied by lashings of gratitude, sort of like this. Bonaparte Ucanasa, thank you. Eugenia Sproul, thank you. Kaya Lund, thank you, thank you, thank you.

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Adrian Fry, thank you. Now, before we go, Nell, is there anything you wish to add on the topic of the use of diamonds or anti-troll that we haven't covered? There is. I suppose we slightly covered it, but I just want to sort of emphasize how irritating it is. The number of times that you want to exclaim about this book, that it's just how things are now. This is the man who wrote the novel The Way We Live Now. And yet so many times that would have been, my little annotation would be, but that's just how things are now.

There's so much that we could have just gone through. The stuff on politics is so funny and so good and so true of the contemporary conservative movement in particular. That would be my extra addition. Jennifer, anything you wish to add that we, I mean, I feel like this is the shortest hour we've ever done, isn't it? I mean, there's so much in here. But anyway, is there any one thing you would like to draw our attention to?

Yes, it builds directly on what Nell was just saying, the more things change, et cetera. There's a constant sense of generational devolution in the novel, the sense that things used to be better. People used to treat each other well, where things are on the decline. And that is a constant refrain in America right now. And so not only does the world of Trollope feel familiar, but the sense that that world used to be better feels familiar too. Well, listen, thank you, Jennifer. Thank you, Nell, so much for bringing us the Eustace Diamonds and Trollope. This has been a wonderful discussion.

John, is there anything you would like to add before we go? No, no, I just was, I'm just, I was struck that we didn't talk about. He's very good on reading. And Lizzie Eustace's, I loved her terrible reading of poetry, but it was just the line, the melody of the lines had pleased her ear. She was always able to arouse for herself a false enthusiasm on things which are utterly outside herself in life,

which just sounds to me like the perfect description of what it's like to be a reader. Well, listen, thanks very much, everybody. We're back in a fortnight. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you, Nell. Thanks, John, Nikki. And we'll see you next time.

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