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  • Anthony Trollope's Scarlet Letter
  • David Heddendorf (bio)

Toward the end of his life, writing in aarp magazine, John Updike in "The Writer in Winter," quoted a favorite passage from one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's letters: "Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope?" Hawthorne asks his publisher, James T. Fields, in February 1860; "They precisely suit my taste—solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth, and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of." With his own fiction poised somewhere between Hawthorne's symbolism and Trollope's concreteness, Updike had a special sympathy for the two writers. But he was hardly the first to notice Hawthorne's tribute. The letter has been quoted numerous times by critics wishing to contrast Hawthorne's fanciful tales with Trollope's down-to-earth narratives of contemporary life. In fact Hawthorne's inquisitive giant is one of the best-known touchstones for differentiating romance and realism, the two main impulses in nineteenth-century fiction.

F. O. Matthiessen linked Hawthorne's letter to an equally famous paragraph in "The Custom-House," in which Hawthorne looks back on "the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters" he encountered as surveyor of customs. Had he "attempted a different order of composition," he laments, these humble materials might have yielded a "better book than I shall ever write." Hawthorne grieved (or so, at least, he pretended) when he compared his own historical romances with fiction like Trollope's that depicted the present-day world. If the tireless British postal servant, writing on trains at 5:30 in the morning, could produce his massive novels of everyday life, why couldn't Hawthorne convert his own boring job into similar results? Something—a melancholy temperament, his Puritan inheritance, the notorious featurelessness of American social life—prevented Hawthorne from writing novels the way Trollope wrote them. Instead he wrote The Scarlet Letter. [End Page 368]

What might Hawthorne's unwritten novel have looked like, with its no-nonsense characters, prosaic setting, and true-to-life tedium of the custom house? Or, to approach the question the other way: what if Trollope, with his eye for detailed moral predicaments, had tackled the story and themes of The Scarlet Letter?

But he did, faithful Trollope readers might respond. In The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870), Carry Brattle, a "fallen woman," endures a public shaming comparable to Hester Prynne's before she is restored to her family's love and forgiveness. As Trollope acknowledges in his Autobiography, however, Carry is really "a second-rate personage in the tale," just another parish woe for the title clergyman to sort out. Trollope devotes a preface to the wayward Carry, as well as a handful of earnest paragraphs in the Autobiography, but the story itself consigns sexual transgression like Hester's and Arthur Dimmesdale's to a shadowy intermittent subplot.

Eight years before publishing The Vicar of Bullhampton, Trollope produced another book that might seem even further removed from the moody probing of The Scarlet Letter. Orley Farm contains no illicit passion—except the desperate kind that makes parents do terrible things for their children. It is the story of a disputed inheritance, a midnight forgery, and an eagerly anticipated trial. Most of the action, such as it is, takes place in drab offices and interchangeable sitting-rooms. Yet Orley Farm, when not delving into lawyers' consciences, concerns the same somber elements that Hawthorne employed in his masterpiece: a woman's frantic love, a secret misdeed, and the corrosive effects of hidden unconfessed sin.

Orley Farm isn't much of a farm, but instead is a small country house near London owned by a wealthy merchant named Sir Joseph Mason. Sir Joseph always intended to bequeath the property, together with a larger estate in Yorkshire, to his son Joseph. Late in life, however, Sir Joseph remarried and had another son. Upon Sir Joseph's death a codicil to the will gave Orley Farm...

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