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New Hibernia Review 11.2 (2007) 116-129

Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels and Anti-Irish Prejudice
Patrick Lonergan
National University of Ireland, Galway

It is by now taken as axiomatic that representations of Irish characters in Victorian literature were generally negative.1 However, as Roy Foster shows, they were not universally so; we find one example of a positive treatment of Ireland and the Irish in Victorian writing in Anthony Trollope's "Palliser series" of six political novels, which appeared between 1864 and 1880.2 In addition to having an Irishman as the hero of its second and fourth titles, Phineas Finn (1869) and Phineas Redux (1873), the series also anatomizes one of the most important periods in Irish political history, stretching roughly from Disestablishment in 1869 to the founding of the Land League in 1879. The most significant aspect of the Palliser series, though, may be its careful analysis of anti-Irish prejudice and stereotyping, carried out as part of the six books' consideration of prejudicial representations of those who do not conform to Victorian norms. The theme of prejudice dominates the Palliser series. Having lived in Ireland from 1841 to 1859—and having published three books on Irish themes before he began the Palliser novels, Trollope was well aware of how the Irish suffered such prejudice.3 The Palliser series can thus be seen as an attempt to challenge Irish stereotypes in general, while offering a distinctive treatment of two of the most common images of Irishness: the Stage Irishman and the presentation of Ireland as a feminized victim.

In 1853, Charles Dickens encapsulated Victorian attitudes to Otherness. "I have not the least interest in the Noble Savage," he wrote:

I consider him a prodigious nuisance, and an enormous superstition. His calling rum fire-water, and me a pale face, will never reconcile me to him. I don't care [End Page 116] what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage something highly desirable to have civilised off the face of the earth. I think a mere gent (which I take to be the lowest form of civilisation) better than a howling, whistling, clucking, stamping, jumping, tearing savage. . . . [H]e is a savage—cruel, false, thievish, murderous; addicted more or less to grease, entrails, and beastly customs; a wild animal with the questionable gift of boasting; a conceited, tiresome, bloodthirsty, monotonous, humbug.4

Trollope was never slow to point out the differences between himself and Dickens. One large dissimilarity was the extent to which Trollope sought, in his writings, to address the prevalence of stereotyping and prejudice in Victorian culture—of which Dickens's remark is an excellent, if tongue-in-cheek, example.

"One of the most remarkable Insularities" of English society, Dickens wrote elsewhere, "is a tendency to be firmly persuaded that what is not English is not natural."5 Thus, the actions of an individual were judged on the basis of the social or racial group to which he or she belonged, rather than on the character of that individual. Trollope analyzes this tendency extensively in the Palliser novels, from the prejudice Phineas Finn and his wife Marie meet throughout the series, to that suffered by Emilius in The Eustace Diamonds (1873) and Phineas Redux (1874) and Lopez in The Prime Minister (1876). The final novel in the series—The Duke's Children (1880)—dedicates itself to examining this theme as it explores Palliser's refusal to allow his children to marry "beneath themselves" for love: Silverbridge wishes to marry the American Isabel Boncassen, and Mary Palliser the penniless commoner Frank Tregear. Trollope consistently shows that prejudice causes harm to both its victims and its perpetrators.

Trollope's treatments of anti-Semitism and gender have been debated frequently but, with some notable exceptions, few scholars have considered the Irish elements of the Palliser series.6 This derives largely from the influence of a statement Trollope made in An Autobiography (1880) about the series' principal Irish character, Phineas Finn. Writing about the creation of...

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