2 - Arrested Development: Characterisation, the Newspaper and Anthony Trollope

Summary

Many of Anthony Trollope's novels return to the same plot line: characters read misleading depictions of themselves in the newspaper and feel overwhelmed by anxiety and isolation. This happens in The Warden, Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, Doctor Whortle's School, The Prime Minister and others. The recurrence of this plot is no accident: it explores a tension between Trollope's serialised novels and the expanding Victorian newspaper press. By embedding the newspaper into fiction, Trollope interweaves its formal qualities into novelistic narrative; the newspaper disrupts the characters’ processes of Bildung and inculcates a feeling of modern alienation. Georg Lukács famously argued that the limitlessness and formlessness of the novel – what he calls ‘bad infinity’ – is given shape through a biographical story that subordinates details to the development of a single individual. Yet Trollope's protagonists confront another kind of ‘bad infinity’ – the newspaper – that depicts them in ways deeply at odds with their developmental process of selfrecognition. In experimenting with the formal qualities of novels and news, Trollope hypothesises that they enable divergent kinds of national publics to emerge.

Elaine Hadley has argued that Trollope's novels render into narrative the lived protocols of liberalism, as his characters seek to enact liberal values in practice. In a sense, then, characters like Plantagenet Palliser and Phineas Finn are liberal heroes. The Palliser novels trace the gradual development of Finn from an Irishman into a member of British Parliament willing to subordinate his own personal and regional interests to the needs of the national community. These stories of liberal development, however, come into conflict with Trollope's fictionalised newspapers, as editors viciously slander characters in the public sphere, impeding and redirecting these characters’ stories of personal and liberal growth. Trollope's novels are not just about liberal development but also arrested development, as characters are paralysed by the disjunction between self and society. The newspaper and the serial novel thus instantiate conflicting models of modernity for Trollope. The newspapers in his novels cultivate national feeling not through common feeling (as in Anderson's account) but through scapegoats.

While the first chapter of this monograph traced Dickens's varying metaphors for news and narrative, this chapter attends to practices of characterisation in Trollope's fictional construction of the newspaper press.