Castle Richmond
Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882
English
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CASTLE RICHMOND
BY
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALGAR THOROLD
LONDON & NEW YORK: MCMVI
INTRODUCTION
"Castle Richmond" was written in 1861, long after Trollope had left
Ireland. The characterization is weak, and the plot, although the
author himself thought well of it, mechanical.
The value of the story is rather documentary than literary. It
contains several graphic scenes descriptive of the great Irish
famine. Trollope observed carefully, and on the whole impartially,
though his powers of discrimination were not quite fine enough to
make him an ideal annalist.
Still, such as they were, he has used them here with no
inconsiderable effect. His desire to be fair has led him to lay
stress in an inverse ratio to his prepossessions, and his Priest is
a better man than his parson.
The best, indeed the only piece of real characterization in the book
is the delineation of Abe Mollett. This unscrupulous blackmailer is
put before us with real art, with something of the loving
preoccupation of the hunter for his quarry. Trollope loved a rogue,
and in his long portrait gallery there are several really charming
ones. He did not, indeed, perceive the aesthetic value of sin--he
did not perceive the esthetic value of anything,--and his analysis
of human nature was not profound enough to reach the conception of
sin, crime being to him the nadir of downward possibility--but he had a
professional, a sort of half Scotland Yard, half master of hounds
interest in a criminal. "See," he would muse, "how cunningly the
creature works, now back to his earth, anon stealing an unsuspected
run across country, the clever rascal"; and his ethical disapproval
ever, as usual, with English critics of life, in the foreground,
clearly enhanced a primitive predatory instinct not obscurely akin,
a cynic might say, to those dark impulses he holds up to our
reprobation. This self-realization in his fiction is one of
Trollope's principal charms. Never was there a more subjective
writer. Unlike Flaubert, who laid down the canon that the author
should exist in his work as God in creation, to be, here or there,
dimly divined but never recognized, though everywhere latent,
Trollope was never weary of writing himself large in every man,
woman, or child he described.
The illusion of objectivity which he so successfully achieves is due
to the fact that his mind was so perfectly contented with its
hereditary and circumstantial conditions, was itself so perfectly
the mental equivalent of those conditions. Thus the perfection of
his egotism, tight as a drum, saved him. Had it been a little less
complete, he would have faltered and bungled; as it was, he had the
naive certainty of a child, to whose innocent apprehension the world
and self are one, and who therefore I cannot err.
ALGAR THOROLD.
CONTENTS
I. The Barony of Desmond
II. Owen Fitzgerald
III. Clara Desmond
IV. The Countess
V. The Fitzgeralds of Castle Richmond
VI. The Kanturk Hotel, South Main Street, Cork
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