Partying with the Opposition: Social Politics in The Prime Minister

The critical reviews of Anthony Trollope's 1876 novel The Prime Minister resound with a single complaint. Trollope's characters have descended into the netherworld of "vulgarity." The reviewer for the Spectator, for example, sees in Trollope's story "the disposition to attribute to the majority of mankind an inherent vulgarity of thought." ¹ Even previously dignified and aristocratic characters, such as Plantagenet Palliser (now the Duke of Omnium), have been dragged through the mud and made to seem like common people. The reviewer, however, saves her most severe censure for Glencora, Palliser's wife, noting that "She descends . . . to an impossible degree, and perspires with effort in the vulgar crowd till she is utterly unrecognizable." ² The charge of vulgarity is not limited to the actions of the characters but applies equally to the aesthetic experience of reading the novel, as the Saturday Review notes: "To whatever part of the story he may turn, the reader of the Prime Minister is unable to escape the all-pervading sense of artistic vulgarity." ³

Vulgarity, however, is not just an aesthetic problem with the novel; it proves to be a problem within the novel as well. Here the reviewers seem to be taking their cues from Palliser, who charges his wife with this very sin. Seeing the expensive changes that Glencora has made to their estate, Palliser deems the effort vulgar. Glencora, feeling the sting of this condemnation, thinks, "Vulgarity! There was no other word in the language so hard to bear as that." ⁴ For Palliser, vulgarity results from the assumption that money alone represents class. When he sees his redecorated home, with its useless porticos and its carefully designed archery field, he balks at the ostentatious "display." In Palliser's opinion, the flag announcing his arrival is the proper, dignified demonstration of his class position. Ducal flags cannot be purchased, while the "assumed and preposterous grandeur" of his altered home is "as much within the reach of some rich swindler or of some prosperous haberdasher as himself" (I, 175). This, for Palliser, is the root of vulgarity: the accessibility of aristocratic privileges to people who have no need to regard them as a duty. Glencora, unlike her husband, cares little for the pomp of aristocratic tradition. She is concerned instead with providing the type of hospitality she thinks befits a Duke and which she believes will sustain her husband's new position as Prime Minister of the Coalition government. Glencora sees herself as investing in her husband's political position by way of her financial and social stature. For her, a bit of vulgarity is all part of the political game: she must placate and pander to innumerable ministers and politicos, each expecting aristocratic treatment. Her hospitality, then, stems from the opinion that socializing, not politicizing, will provide cohesion to the otherwise fractious Coalition government. She sees, as Palliser grudgingly acknowledges at one point, that "a ministry could best be kept together, not by parliamentary capacity, but by social arrangements, such as his Duchess, and his Duchess alone, could carry out" (I, 162).

Despite the moderate success of Glencora's political endeavors, by the end of the novel she finds herself repenting her behavior. The novel as a whole in fact rejects the very vulgarity it is charged with producing. What, then, we might ask, provoked critics to claim Trollope had committed such a moral and aesthetic breach of conduct? From Palliser's comments, it would seem that vulgarity is entirely an issue of economic class. Here, vulgarity suggests a lack of that ineffable something that constitutes aristocracy: culture, tradition, distinction. The word "vulgar," however, has another sense equally important to Trollope's literary reputation; it means simply "common," the everyday condition of ordinary people. The line between "vulgarity" and "commonness" is, in fact, quite thin. To be "common" suggests a likeness with others and an indistinguishability...