“Bad fiction provides nuggets of social history unobtainable elsewhere,” writes Victorian Glendinning in her magisterial biography Trollope.1 That’s not to say that The Three Clerks (1858) is a bad novel, but I think its value lies more in what it tells us about the 1850s, rather than its ability to keep us away from Netflix. Although Glendinning was referring to another Trollope novel, The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, those title characters make a couple of oblique appearances here, too. Indeed, The Three Clerks is an odd concoction of autobiography, other Trollope novels, and Dickensian pastiche.
The plot centers around the imaginary government Department of Internal Navigation, described as “exactly antipodistic of the Circumlocution Office”. The eponymous clerks - Henry Norman, Alaric Tudor, and Charley Tudor - are all employees of this department. They are also frequent visitors to the suburban home of Mrs Woodward and her three daughters. The young men compete for social advancement in both the civil service and for the hands of the Miss Woodwards. Alaric Tudor, who is just skin stretched over ambition, quickly falls into the eager hands of dodgy stockbroker Undy Scott. He joins several dubious ventures, leading him down a murky path towards embezzlement. As Trollope explains: “It was the nature of Tudor’s disposition, that he never for a moment rested satisfied with the round of the ladder on which he had contrived to place himself. He had no sooner gained a step than he looked upwards to see how the next step was to be achieved.” This is what we might think of in the 21st century as the “hedonic stepladder”. More is more; and you can never have enough.
One of the strengths of this novel is Trollope’s portrayal of what people needed to do to get on in the mid nineteenth century. As in his masterpiece The Way We Live Now (1875), he depicts the survival of the wiliest. Although it’s firmly rooted in the 1850s - the clerks visit the Great Exhibition - it speaks to our time, too. It’s hard to get by on your labour alone, especially in a big city like London. Risky schemes offer the only opportunity for advancement. Getting a steady job wasn’t necessarily the safe option. Indeed, Trollope was writing from experience. His middle-class upbringing was marred by a volatile father and a dashed inheritance. Forced to earn a living, in 1834 he applied to work at the General Post Office. As part of the selection process, he was asked to copy some lines from The Times with an old quill pen, then to return for a maths test. Thanks to the patronage of Sir Francis Feeling, he was appointed without further examination. This was just as well, given his shaky grasp of arithmetic and equally shaky spelling.
The civil service introduced competitive entrance examinations in 1855. Trollope remained opposed to the system, believing that exams couldn’t possibly give an indication of a man’s character. Honesty was more important than the ability to cram. Trollope almost certainly wouldn’t have passed the formal examination, and he also feared for his sons’ ability to do so. In The Three Clerks, he depicts the febrile environment in which young men are competing against each other. Also, the prizes were limited. Trollope’s starting salary was £90 (around £10,000) and his work mainly involved copying documents (just like the bookkeeping rats in A Muppet Christmas Carol. Clerks distracted themselves with smoking, drinking, and playing cards - expensive activities in themselves. Unable to live on his meagre income, Trollope soon fell into the hands of a moneylender. His £12 debt to a tailor ballooned to £200 - around twice his salary. One of the most compelling scenes in the novel is Charley Tudor’s visits to money lender Jabez M’Ruen’s grotty house and the “double-fanged little documents” he’s obliged to sign.
Trollope at least seems to have avoided the financial speculation that causes the downfall of Alaric Tudor. When writing The Three Clerks, he almost certainly had in mind his father-in-law, Edward Heseltine, who had recently stepped down after a long career at the Rotherham Bank. His retirement to Devon was marred by revelations in 1853 that there were “large deficiencies” in the branch’s accounts during his tenure. It emerged that his whole career had been “a combination of dishonesty and muddle”. Victoria Glendinning makes the plausible assertion that Heseltine was using this money to speculate on the railways.2 Trollope later wrote in The New Zealander: “It is not of the swindlers and liars that we need to live in fear, but of the fact that swindling and lying are not becoming abhorrent to our minds.” Fraud had become a feature, not a bug.
Instead, Trollope was bolstering his civil service income by speculating with fiction. When Trollope was earning £90 a year, Charles Dickens - just three years his senior - was trousering £750 for the serialisation of Oliver Twist. Spurred on, Trollope developed the work ethic for which he has become famous - writing for three hours before going to his job at the post office. His first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, was published in 1847. He makes good use of this experience, too. One of the three clerks, Charley Tudor, supplements his salary by writing an awful-sounding novel called Crinoline and Macassar. This novel-within-a-novel device allows Trollope to parody the publishing industry and prevailing literary tastes:
“If you begin with a long history of who’s who and all that, why he won’t read three pages; but if you touch him up with a startling incident or two at the first go off, then give him a chapter of horrors, then another of fun, then a little love or a little slang, or something of that sort, why, you know, about the end of the first volume, you may describe as much as you like, and tell everything about everybody’s father and mother for just as many pages as you want to fill. At least that’s what the editor says.”
Like Charley Tudor, Trollope is liberal with incidents. While he appears to criticise the reliance on plot in mid-Victorian fiction, Trollope tries to mine a successful formula. He overplays his hand, though. The character names become increasingly irritating and downright ridiculous: Mr Everscreech the vicar, Mr Minusex the mathematician, Mr Whip Vigil the official, and Alphabet Precis the clerk. And there are many more where those came from. Dickens was, of course, partial to exaggerated names. However, the fairytale quality of his fiction makes them less jarring. I lost the will to read after encountering Mr Embryo the office junior. Presumably Trollope was pleased with the name Fidus Neverbend (of the Woods and Forests department, since you ask), as he later created John Neverbend as the self-important president in futuristic story The Fixed Period. We are not told whether they are related. The Three Clerks also sees the first appearance of Mr Chaffanbrass, an Old Bailey barrister who appears in Orley Farm and Phineas Finn.
Despite the foolish names, there are many strong characters. The widowed Mrs Woodward is sorely underused: “She was a quick little body, full of good-humour, slightly given to repartee, and perhaps rather too impatient of a fool. But though averse to a fool, she could sympathize with folly.” Although eager to see her daughters happily married, “the old widow knew the value of her money too well to risk it in the keeping of the best he that ever wore boots.” As is often the case in Trollope’s novels, he insists marriage is a woman’s highest calling, but elliptically acknowledges that it’s another form of financial speculation. Mrs Woodward is the wisest character, set against the young men who abound in confidence but lack life experience.
Trollope wrote The Three Clerks aged 43, which turned out to be exactly two-thirds through his life. 3 This accounts for the philosophical tone, including such gems as:
“Alas! how many of us from week to week call ourselves worms and dust and miserable sinners, describe ourselves as chaff for the winds, grass for the burning, stubble for the plough, as dirt and filth fit only to be trodden under foot, and yet in all our doings before the world cannot bring home to ourselves the conviction that we require other guidance than our own!”
There are many similarly insightful asides, but Trollope’s assessment of the novel turned out to be wrong. “It was certainly the best novel I had yet written,” he wrote in his Autobiography. Although he sold the copyright for a respectable lump sum of £250 (~£30,000), it sold poorly, thereby scuppering his chances of a bigger advance on the next novel. Fortunately, he was working on the Barsetshire Chronicles in tandem. The Warden (1855) and Barchester Towers (1857) weren’t immediate hits, but the third instalment Framley Parsonage (1861) was the pay-off. Rather than promoting financial speculation, Trollope showed that diversification and perseverance prevailed. You could say that his novels were a highly successful side hustle. I can’t agree with Trollope’s claim that The Three Clerks was his best work. But, I think it’s an initial sketch for two of his best novels: The Way We Live Now (1875) and The Prime Minister (1876).
This post is part of the Trollope Challenge I started back in 2011. Revisiting those posts, I realised I hadn’t reviewed four of the novels. Nearly 15 years later, I’m making amends 😳