Trollope and the Career: Vocational Trajectories and the Management of Ambition

The critic said to himself, "if it is written by Mr. Trollope, I shall soon meet with the phrase, 'made his way,' as applied to walking where there is no physical difficulty or embarrassment, but only a certain moral hesitation as to the end and aim of the walking in question," and behold within a page at which the silent remark was made, came the very phrase in the peculiar sense indicated.

R. H. Hutton, review of Nina Balatka, Spectator, 23 March 1867 (qtd. in Smalley 268)

Hutton's shrewd detection of Anthony Trollope's authorship of Nina Balatka (1867) does more than reveal an identifiable tic within a prose style straining after the kind of innocuous, transparent ordinariness that might speak for society itself. More importantly, it points us to the cause of this symptomatic self-betrayal: a concern with "making one's way," with progressing toward a goal, about the value of which one remains, nonetheless, unsure—in plainer words, a concern with a career. Nothing less than Trollope's pervasive regard for individual paths and their various obstacles, with "making it," gives him away. Trollope's well-known careerism—his open interest in the growing market power of his fiction, an interest that has had such a deleterious impact on his reputation—is certainly in play here; that his vocational ambitions, capacious enough to spread to two separate careers, might find a voice in even the humblest of his style's habits is perhaps not surprising. Hutton's alert guess, however, directs us even farther than this. Taking his cue, it is possible to read Trollope as a central instance within the mid-Victorian development of the modern sense of "career": as the novelist whose narratives of professional upward mobility demonstrate the emergence of a discrete form of individual life-plan, a "making one's way" that is bound by new imperatives and new difficulties.

"There is, I suppose," Trollope writes in The Claverings (1867), published the same year as Nina Balatka, "no young man possessed of average talents and average education, who does not early in life lay out for himself some career with more or less precision,—some career which is high in its tendencies and noble in its aspirations and to which he is afterwards compelled to compare the circumstances of the life which he shapes for himself" (322). As a précis of his plots in the 1860s and 1870s this claim, which mediates so typically between a sense of "career" as specifically vocational and more broadly biographical, and which limits itself to a male careerism, is fairly accurate. It resonates with the somewhat colorless but nonetheless ambitious male careerists of his mature fiction: parliamentary careerists like Phineas Finn, Frank Greystock of The Eustace Diamonds (1873), and Frank Tregear of The Duke's Children (1880); Civil Service careerists like Alaric Tudor and Harry Norman of The Three Clerks (1859); careerists in the applied sciences and engineering, like The Claverings's own Harry Clavering. These are careerists insofar as their ambition carries them not to extremes of success or degradation, like some Balzacian parvenu, but merely to the next rung on the ladder; their stories turn on a named progression of professional stations, how quickly those stations are traversed, and how that progression veers from suddenly fluid to insuperably blocked. Telling their stories is, I would suggest, tantamount to telling the story of the narrativization of professional labor itself in the Victorian period: how social and vocational ambition found itself newly structured by the figure of "career," and how the figure of "career" managed to create linear, ordered sequences out of the disruptive energies unleashed by the spread of professionalism itself in the early and mid-nineteenth century.

As such, this inquiry takes its impetus from the burgeoning field of work on Victorian professionalism and its various forms, but by way of inquiring how one crucial and understudied cognate...