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Elements of Matrix
Modeling and
Computing
with
MATLAB ®
Elements of Matrix
Modeling and
Computing
with
MATLAB ®

Robert E. White

Boca Raton London New York

Chapman & Hall/CRC is an imprint of the

Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
CRC Press
Taylor & Francis Group
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Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742

© 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

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Version Date: 20110713

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Contents

List of Figures vii

List of Tables xi

Preface xiii

Introduction xv

1 Vectors in the Plane 1

1.1 Floating Point and Complex Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Complex Valued Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.3 Vectors in R2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.4 Dot Product and Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
1.5 Lines and Curves in R2 and C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

2 Vectors in Space 47
2.1 Vectors and Dot Product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.2 Cross and Box Products . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
2.3 Lines and Curves in R3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.4 Planes in R3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
2.5 Extensions to Rq . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86

3 Ax = d: Unique Solution 95
3.1 Matrix Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
3.2 Matrix Products . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
3.3 Special Cases of Ax = d . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
3.4 Row Operations and Gauss Elimination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
3.5 Inverse Matrices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
3.6 OX Factorization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
3.7 Determinants and Cramer’s Rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

4 Ax = d: Least Squares Solution 171

4.1 Curve Fitting to Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
4.2 Normal Equations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182

v
vi CONTENTS

4.3 Multilinear Data Fitting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191

4.4 Parameter Identification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

5 Ax = d: Multiple Solutions 209

5.1 Subspaces and Solutions in R3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
5.2 Row Echelon Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
5.3 Nullspaces and Equilibrium Equations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230

6 Linear Initial Value Problems 243

6.1 First Order Linear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
6.2 Second Order Linear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
6.3 Homogeneous and Complex Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
6.4 Nonhomogeneous Dierential Equations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
6.5 System Form of Linear Second Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272

7 Eigenvalues and Dierential Equations 281

7.1 Solution of x0 = Dx by Elimination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
7.2 Real Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
7.3 Solution of x0 = Dx + f (w) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296

8 Image Processing in Space Domain 311

8.1 Matrices and Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
8.2 Contrast and Histograms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
8.3 Blurring and Sharpening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331

9 Image Processing in Frequency Domain 343

9.1 Laplace and Fourier Transforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
9.2 Properties of DFT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
9.3 DFT in Rq × Rq . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
9.4 Frequency Filters in Rq × Rq . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 370

A Solutions to Odd Exercises 381

Bibliography 397

Index 399
List of Figures

1.1.1 Complex Numbers as Arrows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

1.1.2 Norm(} 2 ) and Angle(} 2 ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.2.1 A!ne, Square and Square Root of z . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.2.2 Solutions of } 12 = 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1.3.1 A Vector in the Plane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.3.2 f2 = d2 + e2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1.3.3 f2 = e2 + d2  2de cos() . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
$
 $ $ 
 $ $

1.3.4 d + e >d  e and v e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.4.1 Trigonometric Identity and Dot Product . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.4.2 Area and Dot Product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
1.4.3 Linearly Independent Vectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
1.4.4 Work and a Ramp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
1.4.5 Torque on a Wheel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
1.4.6 Work with Independent Paths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
1.5.1 Line Given a Point and Direction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
1.5.2 Minimum Distance of Point to a Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
1.5.3 Cycloid and Wheel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
1.5.4 Cycloid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
1.5.5 Two-tone Signal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

2.1.1 Point in Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

2.1.2 Vector in Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.1.3 Vector Addition in Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
2.2.1 Unit Vector Cross Products . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
2.2.2 Projected Area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
2.2.3 Box Product and Volume . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
2.2.4 Determinant and Volume . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
2.3.1 Vector Equation and Minimum Distance . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
2.3.2 Distance between Two Lines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
2.3.3 Helix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
2.3.4 Projectile in Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
2.4.1 Normal and Point . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
2.4.2 Three Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

vii
viii LIST OF FIGURES

2.4.3 Linear Combination of Vectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

2.4.4 Minimum Distance to a Plane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
2.5.1 Mesh of Image Matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
2.5.2 Imwrite of Image Matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
2.5.3 Negative Image Matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

3.1.1 Box with Fixed Volume . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

3.1.2 Cost of a Box . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
3.1.3 Two-bar Truss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
3.1.4 Two-loop Circuit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
3.2.1 Heat Conduction in a Wire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
3.2.2 Steady State Heat Diusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
3.3.1 Temperature in Wire with Current . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
3.4.1 Six-bar Truss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
3.5.1 Five-bar Truss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
3.6.1 Three-loop Circuit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
3.6.2 Potential in a Single-loop Circuit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
3.7.1 Three-tank Mixing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

4.1.1 Sales Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

4.1.2 Least Squares Function for Sales Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
4.1.3 Radioactive Decay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
4.2.1 World Population Prediction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
4.4.1 US Population and Logistic Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
4.4.2 Temperature Data and Curve Fit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

5.3.1 Bar e with Four Forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

5.3.2 Fluid Flow in Four Cells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

6.2.1 Mass-Spring System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251

6.3.1 Variable Damped Mass-Spring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
6.4.1 Forced Mass-Spring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
6.5.1 Series LRC Circuit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
6.5.2 Tuned Circuit with Modulated Signal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

7.3.1 Heat Diusion in Thin Wire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308

8.1.1 Pollen Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312

8.1.2 Enhanced Pollen Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312
8.1.3 Aerial Photo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
8.1.4 Enhanced Aerial Photo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
8.1.5 Mars Rover Photo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
8.1.6 Enhanced Mars Rover Photo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
8.1.7 Moon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
8.1.8 Sharper Moon Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
8.1.9 Plot of the Matrix C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
LIST OF FIGURES ix

8.1.10 Image of Letter C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317

8.1.11 Negative Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318
8.1.12 Matrix NCSU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318
8.1.13 Image of NCSU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
8.1.14 Negative Image of NCSU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
8.1.15 Center Grain in Pollen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
8.2.1 Histogram of Pollen Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
8.2.2 Histogram of Lighter Pollen Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324
8.2.3 Lighter Pollen Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
8.2.4 Piecewise Linear Function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326
8.2.5 Histogram for Enhanced Pollen Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
8.2.6 Higher Contrast Pollen Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
8.2.7 Mars Rover Image Using Power 1/2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
8.2.8 Mars Rover Image Using Power 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
8.3.1 Deblurred 1D Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334
8.3.2 Original NCSU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
8.3.3 Blurred NCSU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
8.3.4 Deblurred NCSU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
8.3.5 Increased Contrast Pollen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338
8.3.6 Brighter and Sharper Pollen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339
8.3.7 Original Moon Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340
8.3.8 Brightened and Sharpened . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341

9.2.1 DFT of Sine and Cosine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354

9.2.2 Noisy Sine Function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
9.2.3 Filtered Sine Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360
9.3.1 2D DFT of Sine and Cosine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364
9.3.2 Noisy 2D Sine Wave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367
9.3.3 Mesh Plot of Noisy Sine Wave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368
9.3.4 DFT of Noisy Sine Wave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368
9.3.5 Low-pass Filter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369
9.3.6 Filtered DFT of Sine Wave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369
9.3.7 Filtered Sine Wave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 370
9.4.1 Noisy NCSU Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 372
9.4.2 Low-pass Filtering of NCSU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373
9.4.3 Ideal Low-pass NCSU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373
9.4.4 Band-reject Filtering of NCSU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 374
9.4.5 Band-reject Filtered NCSU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 374
9.4.6 Light and Noisy Aerial Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376
9.4.7 Filtering Aerial Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376
9.4.8 Filtered Aerial Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377
9.4.9 Micro Chip Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378
9.4.10 Sharpening of Micro Chip Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378
9.4.11 Sharpened Micro Chip Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
List of Tables

4.1.1 Computer Sales Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

4.1.2 World Population Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
4.1.3 Radioactive Decay Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
4.3.1 Multlinear Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
4.3.2 Price Data for Three Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
4.3.3 Home Appraisal Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
4.3.4 Three-tank Mixing Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
4.4.1 US Population Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
4.4.2 Temperature Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205

xi
Preface

An important objective of this book is to provide "math-on-time" for second

year students of science and engineering. The student should have had one
semester of calculus. The student most likely would take this matrix course
concurrently with the second semester of calculus or would use this text for in-
dependent study of these important topics. This text fills in often missed topics
in the first year of calculus including complex numbers and functions, matri-
ces, algebraic systems, curve fitting, elements of linear dierential equations,
transform methods and some computation tools.
Chapters one and two have introductory material on complex numbers, 2D
and 3D vectors and their products, which are often covered in the beginning of
multivariable calculus. Here a connection is established between the geometric
and algebraic approaches to these topics. This is continued into chapters three,
four and five where higher order algebraic systems are solved via row operations,
inverse matrices and LU factorizations. Linearly independent vectors and sub-
spaces are used to solve over and under determined systems. Chapters six and
seven describe first and second order linear dierential equations and introduce
eigenvalues and eigenvectors for the solution of linear systems of initial value
problems. The last two chapters use transform methods to filter distorted im-
ages or signals. The discrete Fourier transform is introduced via the continuous
versions of the Laplace and Fourier transforms. The discrete Fourier transform
properties are derived from the Fourier matrix representation and are used to
do image filtering in the frequency domain.
The first five chapters can be used as a two-credit course (28 50-minute
classes). Among the nine chapters there is more than enough material for a
three-credit course. This three-credit matrix course when coupled with a nine-
or ten-credit calculus sequence can serve as a more "diverse" alternative to the
traditional twelve-credit calculus sequence. The twelve-credit calculus sequence
can be adapted to this alternative by reducing the precalculus, moving some of
2D and 3D vectors and dierential equations into the matrix course, and using
computing tools to do the complicated computations and graphing.
Most sections have some applications, which should indicate the utility of the
mathematics being studied. Seven basic applications are developed in various
sections of the text and include circuits, trusses, mixing tanks, heat conduc-
tion, data modeling, motion of a mass and image filters. The applications are

xiii
xiv PREFACE

developed from very simple models to more complex models. The reader can
locate sections pretaining to a particular application by using the index.
°R
MATLAB is used to do some of the more complicated computations. Al-
though the primary focus is to develop by-hand calculation skills, most sec-
tions at the end have some MATLAB calculations. The MATLAB m-files used
in the text are listed in the index and are included in the book’s Web site:
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~white. The approach to using computing tools in-
cludes: first, learn the math and by-hand calculations; second, use a computing
tool to confirm the by-hand calculations; third, use the computing tool to do
more complicated calculations and applications.
I hope this book will precipitate discussions concerning the core mathemat-
ical course work that scientists and engineers are required to study. Discrete
models and computing have become more common, and this has increased the
need for additional study of matrix computation, and numerical and linear al-
gebra. The precise topics, skills, theory and appropriate times to teach these
are certainly open for discussion. The matrix algebra topics in this book are
a small subset of most upper level linear algebra courses, which should be en-
hanced and taken by a number of students. This book attempts to make a
bridge from two- and three-variable problems to more realistic problems with
more variables, but it emphasizes skills more than theory.
I thank my colleagues who have contributed to many discussions about the
content of this text. And, many thanks go to my personal friends and Liz White
who have listened to me emote during the last year.

Bob White
MATLAB is a registered trademark of The MathWorks, Inc. For product
information, please contact:

The MathWorks, Inc.

3 Apple Hill Drive
Natick, MA 01760-2098 USA
Tel: 508-647-7000
Fax: 508-647-7001
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: www.mathworks.com ?http://www.mathworks.com/A.
Introduction

One can view an p×q matrix as a table of objects with p rows and q columns.
The objects are usually real or complex numbers, but they could be characters
or records of information. A simple example is data for the last 12 months of
car sales where there are p = 12 rows and q = 2 columns. The first column
will have the month’s number and the second column will have the number of
cars sold in the corresponding month. By examining the data one would like
to make a prediction about futures sales. This is where the modeling enters.
If the graph of the sales versus months "looks" like a straight line, then the
data may be modeled by a linear function of time | = pw b + f. The slope p b
and intercept f must be chosen so that the computed sales are "close" to the
car sales data. This is done by appropriate manipulations of the two column
vectors and computing a solution of the resulting system of algebraic equations.
Once p b and f have been found, the predicted sales for w larger than 12 can
easily be calculated by evaluating the linear function. The modeling process is
complicated by incorrect sales data, changing prices and other models such as
a parabolic function of time.
This text examines a variety of applications, which have matrix models and
often have algebraic systems that must be solved either by-hand calculations
or using a computing tool. Applications to projectiles, circuits, mixing tanks,
trusses, heat conduction, motion of a mass, curve fitting and image enhancement
will be initially modeled in very simple ways and then revisited so as to make
the model more accurate. This is typical of the modeling process where there is
an application, a model, mathematical method, computations and assessment
of the results. Then this cycle is repeated so as to enhance the application’s
model.
The first two chapters deal with problems in two- and three-dimensional
space where the matrices have no more than three rows or columns. Here
geometric insight can be used to understand the models. In Section 2.5 the
extension to higher dimensions is indicated for vectors and matrices, solution
to larger algebraic systems, more complicated curve fitting, time dependent
problems with systems of dierential equations and image modeling. Chapters
three, four and five have the basic matrix methods that are required to solve
systems in higher dimensions. Chapters six and seven contain time dependent
models and introduce linear systems of dierential equations. The last two

xv
xvi INTRODUCTION

chapters are an introduction to image and signal processing.

Most sections have some by-hand matrix calculations in the numbered ex-
amples, some applications and some MATLAB computations, see [4] and [6].
The focus is on the by-hand calculations, and one should carefully study the
numbered examples. Each numbered example usually has two exercises associ-
ated with it. There are also additional exercises, which may fill in some parts of
the text, be related to applications or use MATLAB. This text is not intended to
be a tutorial on MATLAB, but there are a number of short codes that may help
you understand the topics being discussed. The by-hand calculations should be
done, and MATLAB should be used to confirm these calculations. This will give
you confidence in both your understanding of the by-hand matrix computation
and the use of MATLAB. Larger dimensional problems can easily be done using
MATLAB or other computer software.
The following matrices are used in Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 9, and they can
be generalized to larger matrices enabling one to cross the bridge from models
with few variables to many variables.
5 6 5 6
0 0 0 1 0 0
]=7 0 0 0 8 L=7 0 1 0 8
0 0 0 0 0 1
5 6 5 6
1 0 0 1 7 10
H32 (3) = 7 0 1 0 8 X =7 0 2 4 8
0 3 1 0 0 3
5 6 5 6
2 1 0 200 1 1 0 200
[D g] = 7 1 2 1 0 8 b = 7 0 3@2 1
[X g] 100 8
0 1 2 70 0 0 4@3 410@3
5 6 5 6
2 1 0 0 8 6 4 2
9 1 2 1 0 : 9 6 12 8 4 :
D=9 7 0 1 2 1 8
: D1 = (1@10) 9
7 4 8 12
:
6 8
0 0 1 2 2 4 6 8
5 6
1 1 5 6
9 2 1 : 1 2 3 4 5
OV = 97 3 1 8
: UHI = 7 0 0 1 2 1 8
0 0 0 0 0
4 1
5 6
1 1 1 1
9 1 } }2 }3 :
F4 = 9
7 1 }2 1 }2 8
:

1 }3 }2 }
Chapter 1

Vectors in the Plane

This chapter contains geometric and algebraic descriptions of objects in two

dimensional space, R2 > and in the complex plane, C. The objects include vec-
tors, lines, complex valued functions and some curves. Fundamental operations
include vector addition and dot product. The basic properties of complex num-
bers and complex valued functions are introduced. Applications to navigation,
work, torque, areas and signal representation via phasors are given.

1.1 Floating Point and Complex Numbers

In this section we first discuss the integers and rational numbers. The floating
point numbers, which are used in computers, are a finite subset of the rational
numbers. The real and complex numbers are natural extensions of these. The
complex numbers also can be represented by directed line segments or vectors in
the plane. Although initially complex numbers may appear to be of questionable
value, they will be used extensively in the chapters on dierential equations and
image processing.

1.1.1 Rational Numbers

The integers are the set of whole numbers and include both positive, negative
and zero
Z  {· · ·  2> 1> 0> 1> 2> · · · }=
The addition and product of two integers are also integers. Any integer can
be uniquely factored into a product of prime numbers (an integer that is only
divisible by itself and one). For example, 90 = 51 32 21 =
The rational numbers are fractions of integers p@q where q is not zero and
p and q are integers

Q  {p@q : p> q 5 Z> q 6= 0}=

1
2 CHAPTER 1. VECTORS IN THE PLANE

The set of rational numbers has a countable but infinite number of elements.
Also, the addition and product of two rational numbers are rational numbers.

1.1.2 Real Numbers

Any real number is approximated by a sequence of rational numbers. Tradi-
tionally, one uses a base ten decimal expansion with {l > h 5 Z and 0  {l ? 10

{ = ±(={1 · · · {g · · · )10h
 ±({1 @10 + · · · + {g @10g + · · · )10h =

This expansion is either a bounded increasing or decreasing sequence of rational

numbers and, therefore, by the completeness axiom for the real numbers it must
converge.

R  {±({1 @10 + · · · + {g @10g + · · · )10h : {l > h 5 Z> 0  {l ? 10}=

Real numbers contain the rational numbers, but not all real numbers are
rational. For example, consider { = 31@2 where 3 is a prime number. If { were
a rational number, then { = p@q giving 3 = p2 @q2 and 31 q2 = p2 . The
left side has an odd number of prime factors 3, and the right side has an even
number of prime factors 3. This contradicts the unique factorization property
and, hence, { cannot be a rational number.

1.1.3 Floating Point Numbers

Computers use a finite subset of the rational numbers to approximate any real
number. This set of numbers may depend on the computer being used. How-
ever, they do have the same general form and are called floating point num-
bers. Any real number { can be represented by an infinite decimal expansion
{ = ±(={1 · · · {g · · · )10h , and by truncating this we can define the chopped
floating point numbers.
Let { be any real number and denote a floating point number by

i o({) = ±={1 · · · {g 10h

 ±({1 @10 + · · · + {g @10g )10h =

This is a floating point number with base equal to 10 where {1 is not equal
to zero, {l are integers between 0 and 9, the exponent h is an integer between
given integers i and j and g is a positive integer called the precision of the
floating point system

F  {±({1 @10 + · · · + {g @10g )10h : {1 6= 0> 0  {l ? 10> 0 ? g}=

Associated with each real number, {, and its floating point approximate
number, i o({), is the floating point error, i o({)  {. This error decreases as
the precision, g, increases. Each computer calculation has some floating point
Discovering Diverse Content Through
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among those of an earlier date had touched the phases of the theme
specially appealing to our novelist. In fiction the dates just given would
exempt him from any suspicion of obligation to Bulwer or Dickens. His
originality stamps itself on the opening chapter of La Vendée, and is
consistently maintained throughout. Before the action of the novel begins,
its royalist heroes can no longer doubt the resolution reached by the
municipality of Paris that the king should fall. The Convention, in fact, was
already founding the republic. The actual process, indeed, had advanced far
enough to array the country gentlemen of La Vendée (1850) and their
retainers in arms against the new régime. The entirely fresh descriptive
feature of the opening chapters is the account of social Paris when the
Jacobins were entrapping Louis XVI.
Here Trollope drew not on Alison, but the first-hand knowledge
conveyed to him by his mother. Mrs. Trollope, in her turn, had been taken
behind the political scenes of the period by the man whom the royalists in
her son’s story agreed could alone save the throne. This was the same
General Lafayette that Trollope’s parents had visited in his French country
house and that always remained their chief friend abroad. During the early
months of 1792, most of the haute noblesse had exchanged the French
capital for London or for the English country houses, many of them, as has
been already said, familiar to Trollope. They left, however, behind them
enough of wit, beauty, and fashionable brilliance to prevent the capital from
losing its character of the Western world’s polite metropolis. The city, in a
phrase of a contemporary writer, H. S. Edwards, that took Trollope’s fancy,
from having been the Lutetia of the ancients had become the lætitia of the
moderns. Intellectual interest in the progress of the Revolution, up to the
beginning of the king’s imprisonment, had the effect of obliterating class
distinctions. It produced a certain solidarity between the professional
classes which supplied the revolutionary leaders, and the more enlightened
of the aristocracy that, long since admitting the necessity of drastic social
ameliorations, had, as Trollope summarises it, approved the early demands
of the tiers état, had applauded the tennis-court oath, had entered with
enthusiasm into the fête of the Champ de Mars. These had credulously
persuaded themselves that sin, avarice, and selfishness were about to be
banished from the world by philosophy.
Bitter experience had already taught them their mistake. Philosophy
placed no check upon human nature’s worst passions. The high-flown
panegyrics on virtue in the abstract were practically consistent with the
letting loose of the tiger and the ape in individuals. The feast of reason that
followed the beheading of the king proved the introduction to the long-
drawn-out orgy of fiends lasting till Robespierre’s death in 1794. What
refuge could there be for the now undeceived dupes of their own fond
expectations but in flight? Those who from the first had remained courtiers
or royalists, and those whom a spurious philanthropy had caused to dally
with wholesale homicide, hastened to put the English Channel between
themselves and a capital and country from which had vanished all hope of
personal safety or service to their fellow-men. Some gallant spirits had long
lingered on near the place of the king’s confinement, refusing even now to
despair of some happy chance that might favour his escape from his
enemies, and enable his friends to conduct him permanently out of danger.
Such were the historical circumstances and actual conditions of the time
without a knowledge of which Trollope’s third novel cannot be rightly
understood. Its title came from the new republican name for the vintage
districts of Anjou and Poitou, La Vendée (vendange). Those of its gentry
who had rallied round the king were known in Paris as the Poitevins. The
hope of which this little group supplied the leaders was scarcely so forlorn
as it has been described since, during the seven years period covered by
Trollope’s novel, the Vendean resistance to the Convention was carried on
not only with unfailing courage but occasionally with substantial military
success. In Paris, where the story opens, the Poitevins had attracted to their
number some among the more moderate members of the Assembly, and
particularly certain of those who had been officers of the royal bodyguard.
They formed themselves into a club whose meetings were held in the Rue
Vivienne. The last of these gatherings took place on August 12, 1792, and
lasted just long enough to acquaint all present with the final and complete
defeat of the moderates, who so far had clung to the conviction that in some
unexplained manner the monarchy would be preserved from final
overthrow. Against all gentler counsels, against, in Trollope’s words, the
firmness of Roland, the eloquence of Vergniaud, the patriotism of Guadet,
the brute force of Paris had prevailed.
Louis XVI, his worst enemies could not deny, had inherited none of his
predecessor’s vices, and had shown himself the friend of popular rights. He
had indeed actually himself convoked the Assembly that had no sooner
come together than it resolved on his destruction. The Poitevins, however,
had correctly estimated their resources in their respective neighbourhoods.
With a good heart they now welcome and prepare for open war. When told
that the sovereign’s defenders are outvoted in the Assembly and that
resistance to the people is vain, they one and all protest against dignifying
by that name the mob of blood-thirsty ruffians who for the time have the
capital at their mercy. The real voice of the French people is for the
monarch’s restoration to his rights. Under the Vendean gentry as leaders the
masses will rise like one man against the demagogues who so foully
misrepresent them. The real enemies of France and of the king are in each
case the same men. To save the country from the usurpations of the
Assembly falsely called national is also to deliver the lawful ruler from the
dungeon to which, in the midst of this heroic oratory, comes the news of
Louis having been consigned.
That for the present the mission of the patriots in Paris cannot proceed
further is now admitted by all. Before, however, the patriots disperse, each
to his own provincial neighbourhood, we have made acquaintance with the
clearly and picturesquely characterised individuals of whom they consist.
Its most prominent member, Lescure, is a type, historically true, of the
educated and enlightened Frenchman, keenly alive to the abuses and evils
of the aristocratic system that were at the root of popular degradation and
distress. His mind had been nurtured, and his political education derived,
from studying classical republicanism, as it existed in Athens and Rome. He
was deeply read in Rousseau, Voltaire, and in the whole literature of the
encyclopædists. An amiably philanthropic disposition had combined with
tendencies of his intellectual culture to take for his watchwords Liberty,
Fraternity, though not, it would seem, Equality. On perceiving the new
movement to mean universal surrender to an ignorant and brutal mob, he
drew back, to find himself gradually pressed into the presidency of the little
Poitevin society. This personification of high-minded and cultivated
philanthropy numbered amongst its followers the youthful heir to an ancient
and wealthy territorial marquisate, Henri de Larochejaquelin.[8] His
principles had been formed on those of his elder, Lescure, but his
temperament, eager, impetuous, delighting in the rush and whirl of social
gaiety, forms a contrast to his staid and judicious senior. In one respect he
stands out as a product of the period. The new generation was often
noticeable for the precocious manhood developed in the hothouse
atmosphere of a convulsive epoch. Since reaching his seventeenth year, the
young noble now mentioned, in consequence of his father’s ill-health, had
taken upon himself the paternal estates’ management, and his sister
Agatha’s guardianship.
Adolphe Denot is another who has a place in this little company. Born to
a position of territorial ownership in Poitou, Denot represents in Trollope’s
story the superficial votaries of political change, ready to take up with the
newest mode in public affairs, without the trouble of inquiring into its
significance or worth. Without Lescure’s historical knowledge and
reflective habits, he belonged to the same section of French society as that
in which Lescure had been reared. The earliest French protests against the
tyranny of ages came from the French nobility themselves. Never in the
theatre at Versailles had louder applause been excited than by the lines of
Voltaire’s play, produced during the interval separating the first from the
last quarter of the eighteenth century: “I am the son of Brutus, and bear
graven on the heart the love of liberty and a horror of kings.” In the cheers
that greeted these words, Trollope’s Denot might have followed the vogue
by joining. J. J. Rousseau no doubt made himself personally responsible for
the doctrine of the people’s sovereignty and its consequences. Before,
however, its proclamation by him, Voltaire’s wit had secured the notion
acceptance with rank, fashion, aristocracy, and even the Court circle.
Recently, however, the enthusiasts for freedom in the royal playhouse had
discovered everything which savoured of revolution to be insufferably
vulgar. He had therefore gone over to Larochejaquelin’s lead, and enrolled
himself under Lescure in the little Poitevin clique. Petted and caressed, as
Trollope puts it, by the best and fairest in France, the revolution was still in
its infancy when men discovered it to be a beast of prey, big with war,
anarchy, and misrule.
The royalist organisation now described having been disbanded in the
capital, the scene changes to those regions of southern France known as La
Vendée. The country gentlemen of Anjou and Poitou were generally
landlords of the smaller kind. They lived in comfort, but without any
ambition for mere splendour. No pride in the antiquity of their race
prevented their treating their tenants and household retainers less as
dependents than equals. The instances of this now given exemplify
Trollope’s favourite thesis that in a patrician dispensation characterised by
thoughtfulness on the part of its controllers for those who live under it,
there is more of the true democratic spirit than marks the most levelling
variety of popular self-rule. The gentlemen of La Vendée have no sooner
reappeared in their country homes than the counter-revolution, without any
fostering agitation on their part, almost of its own accord sets in.
The Vendeans had heard from their rural seclusion of the king’s
imprisonment, and of the insults offered by his republican jailors to the
time-honoured ordinances of Church and State. There is no need for
Lescure, Larochejaquelin, and the others to stimulate the local peasantry by
fresh appeals against the emissaries of the detested republic. These only
show themselves for the purpose of enrolling fresh conscripts, and forcibly
apprehending a reluctant recruit. The spontaneous popular resistance ends
in a pitched battle, with victory for the royalists. Operations are now on a
larger scale. The struggle is no longer between small local garrisons on the
one hand, and hastily levied, imperfectly disciplined royalist bodies on the
other. Henceforth two armies, each tolerably marshalled and fairly
equipped, meet each other in the field. Sieges are laid, attacks are delivered,
sometimes repelled and sometimes succumbed to; all the combatants are
engaged, towns are captured, private parks transform themselves into
entrenched camps. Durbellière particularly, the country seat of the
Larochejaquelins, becomes the theatre of a war conducted with sanguinary
resolution on both sides, and with constantly varying fortunes. Among each
host brave deeds in plenty are done. With the royalists the most picturesque,
heroic, and victorious figure is that of Henri de Larochejaquelin, whose red
sash and shoulder-band prove the same talisman of triumph as the snow-
white plume of Henry of Navarre when he defeated the Duke of Mayenne at
Ivry.
With the republicans too were to be found men equally capable or
courageous, if less personally attractive. In the French romance that
followed the Irish novels Trollope made no pretence of making his
imagination the handmaid of history. Bulwer-Lytton, in The Last of the
Barons, circumstantially constructed a bold and picturesque hypothesis as a
plausibly conjectural explanation of the quarrel between Edward IV and
Warwick. That was not at all in Trollope’s way. Equally little is his
inclination, after the fashion of Sir Walter Scott, to play fast and loose with
recorded facts, and to represent authenticated events in the light, and from
the point of view, which happened to suit him. For the most part Trollope
follows through every detail the accurate chronicle of the time. In one case,
however, that he may account for the disappearance from his narrative of
the character he calls Adolphe Denot, he departs from the historic record.
According to Trollope, the Chouans, or Bretons who continued the Vendean
War, followed a mysterious, if not an actually insane leader. The alleged
mystery is mere invention. No personage of the period is more historical
than Jean Cottereau, who from the first led the Bretons, and whose signal,
the cry of the screech-owl (chat-huant), gave their name to the little Breton
band. Nor can it be said that the historian’s version of events is, even for
artistic purposes, improved on by the novelist’s discovery, in the Vendean
leader, of Adolphe Denot, who, in an hour of what his friends charitably
called mental aberration, had left the good cause of Church and King, had
thrown in his lot with the revolutionaries. Since then he had remained out of
sight.
At the point now under consideration, the novelist might indeed have
done better, for himself as well as for his readers, had he exercised his fancy
at least on the lines marked out by the historian. At the same time he
deserves the praise of having caught the spirit of his period, as well as of
having imbued his pages with a fair amount of genuine local colour. One
word may be said about the pen-and-ink artist’s methods and the effect of
his picture as a whole. The pervading tone, subdued if not, as in his first
story, The Macdermots, sombre, at well-chosen points is relieved by the
introduction of those lighter tints that Trollope’s quick eye for the humorous
never failed in the right place to bring out. In the loyalist households, of the
Vendean squires, the servants are treated less as inferiors than equals.
Seeing in their employers their friends, and during war-time their comrades,
they vie with each other in proving their devotion to the good cause. There
thus sets in among them a generous rivalry as to who shall be nearest their
lords in the hour of peril. Such a competition provides many happy
openings for sketches of votaries of the sceptre and the crozier outdoing
each other in the still-room and the servants’ hall.
There still remain Trollope’s estimates of the republican managers who,
differing about much, agreed in calling the Vendeans mean curs, fit only for
utter extermination. Six years earlier than the writing of La Vendée,
Macaulay’s article on Barère had appeared in the spring number of The
Edinburgh Review. The estimates of that particular revolutionary leader
given by the historian and by the novelist generally agree with each other,
but in every detail show the mutual independence of their writers.
Macaulay’s account is an oratorical indictment, delivered in a more than
usually impressive manner, and declaring that an amalgam of sensuality,
poltroonery, baseness, effrontery, mendacity, and barbarity, such as in a
novel would be condemned for caricature, was realised in Barère. Beside
the essayist’s portrait of Bertrand Barère, place that in the novel which is
our immediate concern, the one man, in a little party armed to the teeth,
without sword, constantly playing with a little double-barrelled pistol,
which he continually cocked and uncocked, and of which the fellow lay on
the table before him. A tall, well-built, handsome man about thirty years of
age, with straight black hair brushed upright from his forehead, his
countenance gave the idea of eagerness and impetuosity rather than of
cruelty or brutality. He was, however, essentially egotistical and insincere.
A republican not from conviction but from prudential motives, he only
deserted the throne when he saw that it was tottering.
For a time Barère supported the moderate party in the republic, and
voted with the Girondists. He gradually joined the Jacobins, as he saw they
were triumphing over their rivals. He was afterwards one of those who
handed over the leaders of the Reign of Terror to the guillotine, and assisted
in denouncing Robespierre and St. Just. He was one of the very few who
managed to outlive the Revolution, and did so for nearly half a century.
Nature had not formed him to be a monster gloating in blood. The republic
had altered his disposition, and taught him, among those with whom he
associated, to delight in the work which they required at his hands. Thus he
became one of those who loudly called for more blood, while blood on
every side was running in torrents. He too it was who demanded the murder
of the queen, when Robespierre would have saved her. Before the
Revolution he had been a wealthy aristocrat; he still wears the costume of
his earlier period in the blue dress-coat, buttoned closely, notwithstanding
the heat of the weather, round his body; the carefully tied cravat, disfigured
by no wrinkle; the tightly fitting breeches that show the well-shaped leg. As
a contrast to this sometime nobleman gibbeted by Macaulay, Trollope
presents one to another notoriety of the period, known as the “King of the
Faubourgs.” This was a large, rough, burly man, about forty years of age, of
Flemish descent, by trade a brewer, by name Santerre, without fine feelings
to be distressed at the horrid work set him to do, but filled with a coarse
ambition, which made him a ready tool for the schemers who used his
physical powers, courage, and wealth to their own ends.
 The gallery given us by Trollope contains one more portrait, of fresher
interest in itself, and not less life-like in its swift, sure strokes. Westerman
in Carlyle’s description appears as an Alsatian. With Trollope he is a pure
Prussian, a mercenary soldier who, banished from his native land, took
service as a private in the army of the French republic, was soon promoted
to be an officer, and after this promotion, foreseeing the future triumph of
the extreme republicans, declared himself their adherent, and, joining
Dumourier’s army, became that general’s aide-de-camp at the time of his
attempt to sell the French legions to their Prussian and Austrian adversaries.
Then Westerman left his master, and had since been the most prompt and
ruthless military executioner of the Convention’s sternest behests.
Westerman, as drawn by Trollope, is both soldier and politician. Two other
military personages directing the campaign against the Vendeans, Bourbotte
and Chouardin, take no interest in the affairs of State, and are merely rough,
bold, brave fighters. Conspicuous among the Vendean leaders was
Cathelineau. His spirited and fearless life’s work, crowned by a soldier’s
brave death, excited the sympathetic admiration of the republic’s two
military servants. That tribute to an enemy’s great qualities was enough to
draw down upon them the anger of their superiors, especially of Barère. It
was not, however, a time to visit such offences with a severe penalty. Both
Bourbotte and Chouardin escaped without any formal reprimand.
To the sketch of Robespierre and the analysis of his character, Trollope,
as might be expected, gives particular care. Here he supplements rather than
follows those who before him had made this subject their own. “Seagreen
incorruptible” was, says Carlyle, physically a coward, kept from flinching
or turning tail only by his moral strength of purpose. Not so, is Trollope’s
verdict. Courage indeed went conspicuously in hand with constancy of
resolution, temperance in power, and love of country. If at the last he gave
way, it was from the inward torment caused him too late by the discovery
that his whole career had been a blunder, and that none of the objects which
he had first set before himself were fulfilled. Poor mutilated worm,
exclaims the novelist of La Vendée, what was there of pusillanimity in the
remorse of conscience prostrating his whole physical frame, when he
compared the aims which animated him at his beginnings with the results
he saw all about him at his close? From Carlyle, Trollope knew of
Mirabeau’s prophecy on hearing Robespierre’s maiden speech: “This man
will do somewhat; he believes every word he says.” So staunch and
sympathetic a Tory as Alison echoes as well as amplifies that view. And
with him Trollope, who like many other writers about this period had learnt
the usefulness of Alison, agrees.
To the English novelist, not less than to the English historian,
Robespierre’s career stands out not as the offspring of any individual
character, but as representing the delusions of the age. Chief among those
errors ranked a belief in the natural innocence of man. With this fallacy had
united itself another—the lawfulness of doing evil that good might come.
Once exterminate by wholesale bloodshed all who embodied the debasing
influences of a corrupt aristocracy, the masses would rise to the full height
of their native greatness. Thus a triumphant democracy, enthroned upon
mountains of patrician corpses, would wield its beneficent sceptre over a
purified and reanimated society. Here as elsewhere agreeing with, perhaps
indebted to, Alison, Trollope also speaks of Robespierre as omnipotent in
Convention and in the Committee, but as having, too, his master, the will of
the populace of Paris. In union with and in dependence on that, he could
alone act, command, and be obeyed. Alison puts the same idea rather
differently when he says: “Equally with Napoleon during his career of
foreign conquest, Robespierre always marched with the opinions of five
millions of men.”
Apart from the failure of moral fortitude and nerve which weakened and
clouded his end, what particular feature in Robespierre’s temperament and
life gave colour to the charge of cowardice that Carlyle at least considers so
irrefutable? The answer is suggested by Trollope in what forms the most
original passage in this portion of his story. One fond and tender dream
Robespierre could never banish. Once let France, happy, free, illustrious,
and intellectual, own how much she owed to the most disinterested patriot
among her sons, Robespierre would retire to his small paternal estate in
Artois; evincing the grandeur of his soul by the rejection of all worldly
rewards, receiving nothing from his country but adoration. While in
Trollope’s pages he is represented as preoccupied with visions like these,
his garret is entered by a young woman, decently but very plainly dressed.
This was Eleanor Duplay, who, when Robespierre allowed himself to dream
of a future home, was destined to be the wife of his bosom and the mother
of his children. Eleanor Duplay possessed no mark of superiority to others
of her age (about five-and-twenty) and station. The eldest of four sisters,
she specially helped her mother in caring for the house, of which
Robespierre had become an inmate. With no political aptitude or taste of her
own, she had caught, as she believed, political inspiration from his words,
finding in his pseudo-philosophical dogmas, at once repulsive and
ridiculous to modern ears, great truths begotten of reason and capable of
regenerating her fellow-creatures.
Eleanor Duplay has a special object in approaching Robespierre at this
moment, which brings her into the central current of the story. She had, in
fact, undertaken to plead with her father’s lodger the Vendean cause. Both
the girl herself, and the public opinion whose echoes she caught, were
shocked by the wholesale massacre of women and children now going on in
the doomed district after which Trollope called his story. What work, she
had asked herself, when rallying her courage to the task, so fitting for the
wife-elect of a ruler of the people as to implore the stern magistrate to
temper justice with mercy? Her lover’s reception of the first hint at her
prayer is not promising. The Vendeans, he says, must be not only conquered
but crushed. The religion of Christ, he goes on, declares that the sins of the
fathers shall be visited on the children to the third and fourth generation.
Hence the babes must share the fate of their parents. As for the mothers, it
is, says Robespierre, a false sentiment which teaches us to spare the
iniquities of women because of their sex. This interview leads up to one of
the most dramatic situations of the novel, and is so managed as during its
progress to bring out in effective relief the feature of Robespierre’s
character, which other expositors of it have noticed, but which none
illustrated so fully as Trollope. Eleanor Duplay’s petition had not been
completed when her lover’s suspicion—his predominating trait—expresses
itself in an outburst of dark and terrible anger. In vain she assures him that
no one has set her on to talk to him of this. In ordinary men suspicion
sometimes clouds love; in Robespierre, as he is here described, it strangled
the possibility of love at its birth.
 CHAPTER VI

ON HER MAJESTY’S SERVICE AND HIS OWN

Maternal influence in the Barchester novels—Trollope’s first literary

success with The Warden—The Barchester cycle begun—Origin of
the Barchester Towers plot—The cleric in English fiction—
Conservatism of Trollope’s novels—Typical scenes from The
Warden—Hiram’s Hospital—Archdeacon Grantly’s soliloquy—
Crushing the rebels—Position of the Barchester series in the
national literature—Collecting the raw material of later novels—The
author’s first meeting with Trollope—The novelist helped by the
official—Defence of Mrs. Proudie as a realistic study—The
Trollopian method of railway travelling—A daily programme of
work and play.

A T each successive stage of Anthony Trollope’s literary advance, what

he wrote was, throughout his Post Office days, suggested by no
premeditated adventurous effort or mission such as produced the
Dotheboys Hall chapter in Nicholas Nickleby, but was coloured and
conditioned by the shifting circumstances of his daily routine. His
surroundings, whatever for the time they may have been, provided his
theme. Out of past reminiscence, when not from present observation, grew
his personages. It was not in his nature to live two lives, one that of a Post
Office servant, the other that of an author. He made a single life subserve
two ends, one official, the other literary. To this must be added the twofold
obligation to his mother visibly pervading the works that are now being
examined, as the earliest and most stable foundation of his fame. From the
clerical preferences shown in The Vicar of Wrexhill he imbibed his dislike
of evangelicalism and its representatives. Mrs. Trollope too, by early
initiating him into the mysteries of feminine character, imparted to him the
skill in feminine analysis displayed throughout each of his stories that won
real and lasting popularity. Frances Trollope’s appreciations of national
character and of its individual instances invest her book about France with a
grace, charm, and literary effect generally wanting to her Domestic
Manners of the Americans. Her sympathetic insight into French life and
thought attracted her son to the same subjects, and go some way towards
explaining the choice of a theme for his third novel, La Vendée. That book
brought its author the first money he ever made by his pen, £20.
Except perhaps the cultured and gracious High Churchmanship of the
character which gives the story its name, nothing of parental inspiration can
be seen in the general temper, the subject-matter, the dramatis personæ, or
their settings, of the book that, following La Vendée after an interval of five
years, first raised its writer to a recognised place among the novelists of his
time. This was The Warden. Its glimpses of cathedral close, cloister, and of
their dignitaries at duty, or in the private ease of their own homes, owe
nothing, whether as regards treatment or feeling, to Mrs. Trollope’s
evangelical caricatures. Equally independent are they, on the one hand, of
Mrs. Sherwood’s Low Church delineations, or, on the other, of the
romances by which Elizabeth Missing Sewell and Charlotte Mary Yonge
rendered lasting service to the Anglican movement in the nineteenth
century’s second half. Trollope himself always disclaimed any special first-
hand intimacy with clerical life or exclusively clerical society. As a fact,
however, something of the sort had been always familiar to him, if not from
personal experience, still from family tradition. His ancestor, a London
merchant’s son, eventually a dignified and well-known Berkshire vicar,
might easily, if studied from his portraits alone, have suggested particular
features and whole personages for the Barchester gallery. In connection
with the course of its author’s general development, now being traced, The
Warden is a real landmark for other reasons than that it formed his earliest
introduction to the public as a novelist who had not mistaken his calling and
whose works must be read. It was his fourth attempt at fiction, and enabled
him to place before his readers some lineaments and traits of his most
original and best-liked creations. Its way, however, to popularity was won
by slow degrees. While opening the Barchester series, The Warden did not
complete its growth into world-wide favour till that series had advanced
some way.
Apropos of his real start with this book, Trollope, in 1856, told Lord
Houghton that only 750 copies were printed, that they remained over ten
years in hand, but that he regarded the book with affection because, after
having previously written and published for ten years to no satisfactory
purpose, he had made £9, 2s. 6d. by the first year’s sale. “Since then,” he
added with quiet satisfaction, “I have improved even upon that.” From the
biographical point of view necessarily taken in these pages, The Warden is
specially interesting from being the second full revelation of its author’s
attitude to life and character at the dawn of his literary success. The
pervading temper of The Warden closely resembles that previously shown
in La Vendée, and may therefore be described as one of social, moral, and
intellectual conservatism. In the English story, the personal contrasts of
ecclesiastical life making up most of the book were suggested, after the
fashion described by the author, during a summer ramble in Salisbury
Close. That, however, was not the way in which he came by the notion, not
only of The Warden, but of Barchester Towers as well.
Both novels, in Trollope’s own words to the present writer, grew out of
The Times correspondence columns during a dull season of the fifties. The
letters raised and argued, for several days or weeks together, the
controversial issue whether a beneficed clergyman could be justified in
systematic absenteeism from the congregation for whose spiritual welfare
he was responsible. The ecclesiastic who had supplied the subject for this
newspaper discussion was first vehemently attacked by open enemies or
candid friends; he then received the best defence possible from zealous
partisans; and so, after an empty bout of argument, the matter ended. With
Anthony Trollope it had only just begun. The whole question appealed
strongly to his natural turn for social casuistry, especially of the more
disputatious sort. The disclosures of personal motive, rivalry, and object, as
the discussion widened and advanced, were personified by his imagination
in a company of concrete forms. The leading journal’s letters came from
many different persons, and combined every possible variety of opinion.
None of the correspondents were known to the novelist, while his creative
touch was secretly endowing them with the nature, the habit, and the form
that was to give them something like immortality in his pages. Who, he had
asked himself, were these Times letter-writers in private life; what manner
of men did they seem to their associates in the Church and the world, to
their families at home, to their friends abroad? The mental answers to these
questions, elaborated by him during his official progress throughout the
country, resulted in the bodying forth of things unknown, clerical or lay.
Thus did strong imagination, as Hippolyta puts it,[9] call for the first time
into existence beings who, though now belonging to a past order, for the
Victorian age were as full of actuality as Septimus Harding and Archdeacon
Grantly, and who will be scarcely less useful to the nineteenth-century
historian than, in their pictures of the early Georgian epoch, both Lecky and
Macaulay found Congreve’s Parson Barnabas, Fielding’s amiably
evangelical Parson Adams, and his antithesis Parson Trulliber. With those
personages there are no creations in the Barchester novels that can be
compared. And this for the sufficient reason that Fielding, like Congreve,
aimed at reproducing with the pen the vigorous effects of George Morland’s
brush. Trollope, on the other hand, had no sooner advanced some way with
The Warden and the stories which followed it than he had satisfied himself
that his most successful and congenial line was that of light-comedy
narrative. The social atmosphere breathed, and the men and women brought
before us in the Barchester novels are not dominantly, still less exclusively,
clerical. Some of the most popular types are introduced chiefly for the
purpose of connecting the more or less ecclesiastical fictions that followed
The Warden with the panorama of Church dignitaries that formed Trollope’s
early speciality. Even in Barchester Towers several of the sketches most
conspicuous for inherent vitality are altogether lay. The Stanhopes, and of
these the Signora above all, who makes of her sofa a throne before which
the Barchester manhood prostrates itself, Mrs. Bold with her genuine or
pretended lovers, form the purely secular background against which the
Quiverfuls of Puddingdale, the Crawleys of Hogglestock, are thrown out in
strong, sometimes painful, but always effective, relief.
As in The Warden Archdeacon Grantly leads the way to Barchester
Towers, so in Barchester Towers Mr. Arabin, Fellow of Lazarus, Oxford,
links that novel to The Last Chronicle of Barset; while the Thornes of
Ullathorne open the way to Doctor Thorne, Squire Thorne’s cousin, the
social and medical oracle of Greshamsbury Manor, not far from Gatherum
Castle, whose owner, the Duke of Omnium, is to be the central figure in the
political novels. As to Doctor Thorne, the heroine, Mary Thorne, if not
quite such a masterpiece as Miss Dunstable, combines with the Scatcherd
portraits to explain the abiding and even growing popularity of this really
great novel. What Trollope’s sympathies were in La Vendée, such they
showed themselves, not only in The Warden but in all his subsequent
dealing with social and political topics. “Ask for the old paths, where there
is the good way, and walk therein, and find rest therein.” The Hebrew
prophet’s words[10] might have furnished Trollope with a congenial text for
a lay-sermon that would have summed up all his convictions and have
reflected, as in a mirror, the essential and deep-rooted conservatism of his
mind. At the General Election of 1868, indeed, Trollope was to stand as a
Liberal for Beverley. His training in the Civil Service had long since
deepened his distrust of innovation and his hearty resistance to whatever
savoured of new-fangled ideas. At the Post Office, whether serving under
Whig or Tory chiefs, he always stood for the straitest traditions of the
department. He showed himself as obstinately conservative in the traditions
of its routine as his natural tone of mind, fortified by his mother’s precepts
and prejudices, had caused him to be in politics.
As a clerical portrait-painter Trollope produced his work in advance of
George Eliot by four years. Nothing but mutual dissimilarity can be found
between the two schools in which they were respectively trained for the
work. Nor had George Eliot ever lived in Trollope’s exclusive social
environment. Yet Mr. Irwine, in Adam Bede, in his refined vicarage, with
his high-bred mother for housekeeper, might be claimed as a distant relation
by Archdeacon Grantly, notwithstanding the diametrically opposite
associations and experiences of the two novelists. With George Eliot, its
Irwines imparted to the Church a grace and sweetness that made itself felt
even by Dissenters and infidels. “Imagine,” Anthony Trollope seems to
murmur in a series of audible asides, “the curse of a religious establishment
that took its tone not from the Grantlys but the Slopes.” The Warden, like
the rest of the series it opened, is too universally familiar to need any
analysis of its characters or its incidents here. It contains, however, certain
passages which strike the social keynote of its author’s personal
predilections in matters connected with ecclesiastical polity. The portions of
the book now referred to show, in such clear-cut sentences, so
unambiguously and picturesquely, their author’s fondness for the old
régime, notwithstanding, if not almost because of, its defects, that a few
extracts from them will recall more clearly his standpoint in the Barchester
books than could be done by pages of description or comment. About
Septimus Harding himself nothing need be said. St. Cross Hospital, the
original of his Hiram’s Hospital, lies about a mile from Winchester in the
Twyford direction. Its chief custodian might naturally therefore be a
Wykehamist. Could anything, therefore, so gentle have come from the
college of St. Mary Winton? Anthony Trollope would have answered “Yes,”
and did indeed once call The Warden an idealised photograph, whose chief
features were, by an eclectic process, taken from more than one member of
the Sewell family whom, if he had first seen at Winchester, he only came to
know well and observe closely when visiting New College, as his brother’s
guest.
Equally realistic was the genesis of the principal figures grouped round
the Warden. They comprise such old friends as his devoted daughter
Eleanor; John Bold, her declared lover, who is denounced by the masterful
Archdeacon as an enemy of the Establishment, but whom Mr. Harding is
not unwilling to take for his second son-in-law; the inmates of the hospital
themselves; the grateful Bunce, the Warden’s favourite and champion; Abel
Handy, who leads the rebels and malcontents; Mr. Chadwick, whose family
have supplied the Bishops of Barchester with stewards from time
immemorial; the local man of business enlisted on behalf of the status quo;
and, in the background, the London advisers of the Warden’s friends, Cox
and Cummins, who recommend Mr. Harding to seek an interview with that
very eminent Queen’s Counsel, a thorough Churchman, a sound
Conservative, in every respect the best man to be got, Sir Abraham
Haphazard. When in due course that conference has been obtained,
Trollope’s portrait of the legal pundit is at one or two points reminiscent of
that sound lawyer, notwithstanding his life’s failure, his own father. There is
also a paternal touch in the portrait of Mr. Harding himself. The Warden’s
sumptuous treatise on church music recalls Thomas Anthony Trollope’s
erudite work, the Encyclopædia Ecclesiastica, mentioned to, if not
encouraged by, John Murray, but never issuing from Albemarle Street.
Anthony Trollope’s style has been said by twentieth-century critics to
lack distinction. But the various pictures of Dr. Grantly’s intervention in the
hospital affairs have the strength, the certainty, and the ease of touch which
declared in every line the observant humorist. In the pages to which the
reader will presently be referred, Trollope shows his constitutional liking
for the old, well-to-do, gentlemanlike Erastianism of the Establishment not
by any generalities of comment or of moral reflection, but by narrative and
descriptive diction as direct, graphic, and significant as any that ever came
from his own or from any other contemporary pen. Archdeacon Grantly is
on his way to Hiram’s Hospital; noting the signs of picturesque prosperity
around him, he thinks with growing bitterness of those whose impiety
would venture to disturb the goodly grace of cathedral institutions. The
Archdeacon’s complacency has at once been deepened and has developed a
new sensitiveness by the mutiny among Hiram’s almsmen, for the purpose
of quelling which he is now on his way to the hospital. The ringleaders have
not organised the movement without some opposition. The petition to the
diocesan authorities setting forth their grievances has only secured
signatures with some difficulty. The hundred a year claimed by the
almsmen as their right seems to several more likely to be plundered by their
children or belongings than to benefit themselves. The Handy and Skulpit
faction has, however, now been put on its mettle, and already snaps its
fingers at the resistance of the powers that be, “especially old Catgut with
Calves to help him”—otherwise Mr. Harding with his violoncello, and his
son-in-law, in his ecclesiastical war paint.
All these things are well known to the Archdeacon, with whom, as the
representative of Anglican orthodoxy in its most attractive form, Trollope
makes it plain enough what his own sympathies are. Who, our author asks,
would not feel charity for a prebendary, when walking the quiet length of
that long aisle at Winchester, looking at those decent houses, at that trim
grass plat, and feeling the solemn, orderly comfort of the spot? Or who
could be hard upon a dean, while wandering about the sweet close of
Hereford, and owning that here solemn tower and storied window are all in
unison and all perfect? Again, who could lie basking in the halls of
Salisbury, gaze on Jewel’s Library, and on that unequalled spire, without
feeling that bishops should sometimes be rich? Looking upon this pleasant
scene almost with a proprietorial interest, the Archdeacon had answered his
father-in-law’s question, Why shouldn’t they petition? with a brazen echo of
the inquiring words and a remark that he would like to say something to
them altogether, and let them know why they shouldn’t.
Poor Mr. Harding is equally terror-stricken at this first threat of what is
coming, and at his relative’s later insistence on the Warden’s company upon
the occasion. And now the eventful afternoon has come; the hour has
struck. See the Archdeacon as, in Trollope’s picture, he stands up to make
his speech. Erect in the middle of that little square, he looked like an
ecclesiastical statue placed there as a fitting illustration of the Church
militant here on earth; his shovel-hat, large, new, and well pronounced, a
Churchman’s hat in every inch, declared the profession as plainly as does
the Quaker’s broad brim; his heavy eyebrow, large, open eyes, full mouth
and chin, expressed the solidity of his order; the broad chest, amply covered
with fine cloth, told how well-to-do was its estate. One hand ensconced
within his pocket, he evinced the stubborn hold which our mother Church
keeps on her temporal possessions. The other loose for action, was ready to
fight, if need be, in her defence. Below these the decorous breeches and
neat black gaiters, showing so admirably that well-turned leg, betokened the
grace, the decency, the outward beauty of our church establishment. Thus
much for the orator.[11] The speech that follows, read at full length in the
original text, will be admitted to justify every word said about this episode
here. It is also to be noticed that, within less than ten years of his earliest
essay in fiction, Trollope had touched the high-water mark of his literary
excellence. As regards terseness and picturesqueness combined, he never
afterwards described any scene with more power and felicity than Dr.
Grantly’s address to the insurgent almsmen, and his father-in-law’s inward
misery while he is compelled to stand by and listen.
Greater writers than Trollope have failed always to be sure of doing their
best work, as indeed they have themselves been the first to admit. “I
consider,” said Murray to Byron, “about half of your Don Juan to be first-
rate.” Disclaiming that measure of praise, the poet continued: “Were it as
you say, I should have surpassed Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare;
for about which of these can it be said that half of his work was up to the
highest level of his power?” If throughout the rest of The Warden, and in its
Barchester successors, Trollope had kept up the concentration of thought,
the close packing of graphic phrase, and the general exercise of brain-power
at the same point as in the specimens now given, he might have left behind
him portraits scarcely less instinct with immortality than David
Copperfield, Micawber, Steerforth, Uriah Heep, or, passing to the rival of
him who created these, Arthur Pendennis, Clive, Ethel, and Colonel
Newcome. Even as it is, the succession of works beginning with The
Warden, ending with The Last Chronicle of Barset, and taking just twelve
years for their production, will bear comparison with all but the
masterpieces of Trollope’s greatest contemporaries. They will, that is, find a
place only a little below The Newcomes and Our Mutual Friend or George
Eliot’s Middlemarch. Among the fathers of English fiction, Trollope ranks
with Richardson for novelty of ideas and genuine originality of characters.
His portraits may exaggerate personal features, but the more important of
his creations are met with in his pages for the first time. Good or bad,
excellent or mediocre, his Barchester men, women, and children are in all
their lineaments his own.
Among those figuring in Messrs. Longmans’ authors’ list during the
fifties was the Rev. James Pycroft, author of The Cricket Field, as well as
one or two stories. Pycroft’s opinion was justly valued and sometimes asked
by William Longman. Apropos of The Warden, soon after its publication
Pycroft said to Longman: “Here at least you are breaking new ground.
Novels of adventure, of naval or military life, and of politics by Plumer
Ward’s successor Benjamin Disraeli, must be at a discount. But the
domestic economy of the Church, as it is sketched here, is absolutely virgin
soil. Let your new author stick to that; so will he add to your wealth and, if
he have staying power, build up his own fame.” That judgment of a clerical
and literary expert, duly conveyed by the verdict of the publisher to the
author, was followed in 1858 by The Athenæum calling The Warden a
clever, spirited, sketchy story, upon the difficulties surrounding that vexed
question, the administration of charitable trusts. Here was enough
encouragement for Trollope to write, and for Longman to publish,
Barchester Towers; for that, the author did not go more out of his way
specially to make any clerical studies than for The Warden. He had, to quote
his own words to the present writer, “seen a certain amount of clergymen on
my Post Office tours, just as I had seen them before at Harrow or
Winchester; I think too I may have inherited some of my good mother’s
antipathies towards a certain clerical school. But if I have shown any
particular knowledge of or insight into clerical life, it has been evolved
from knowledge of the world in general, varied experience, real hard study,
and a serious course of self-culture. And, I most emphatically add, not from
special intimacy with one, or indeed any, cathedral precinct and its
personages. Take my Barchester. Here and there may be detected a touch of
Salisbury, sometimes perhaps of Winchester. But what I am conscious of
having depicted is the Platonic idea ([Greek: idea]) of a cathedral town;
after all,” he added, “in clerical nature of either sex there is a great deal of
human nature. Humanity varies infinitely in its outer garb; its inward heart
is much about the same everywhere. Aproned prelates and gaitered deans,
with their domestic belongings, are much as the middle-aged gentlemen
who are the heads of purely secular households. Is there as close a family
likeness between my different Barchester books as there used to be between
the successive instalments of The Naggletons in Punch; and is Mrs. Proudie
more ecclesiastical because she possesses to an usual degree the petticoated
intermeddler’s capacity of making her husband’s life a burden to him?
Dickens gibbeted cant in the person of Dissenters, of whom I never knew
anything. I have done so in Mr. Slope, an Anglican, but the unbeneficed
descendant of my mother’s Vicar of Wrexhill.”
The twelve years separating The Warden from The Last Chronicle of
Barset produced fifteen novels. Of these, six were variations on the
Barchester theme, nine placed the reader among scenes and persons entirely
new. Among the characters thus introduced to the public were some who
soon became as real as their author, and whose names to-day are at least as
familiar as his own. Trollope was often accused of exaggeration in the case
of his Barchester folk. He met the charge in this way. “If you look at them
as likenesses of persons seen in the everyday life of cathedral towns, or in
their little ecclesiastical worlds elsewhere, it may be so. But from my point
of view their ecclesiastical setting is merely an accident. Take them for
what I meant them—typical actors and actresses in the comedy of life on
the domestic and provincial stage—where am I guilty of extravagance or
caricature? Cucullus non facit monachum. A man may wear a black coat
and white choker, and clothe his nether limbs in priestly gear, without
losing his idiosyncrasies as a human being. As Sam Slick said, there is a
great deal of nature in human nature; even, he might have added, among the
clerical class. I costumed and styled my people ecclesiastically for the sake
of novelty. Beyond that I never intended my clerical portraiture to go.”
While making his studies and arranging his materials for the stories of
English life that will bear comparison with Jane Austen, he did a good deal
of reading, chiefly with a view of generally equipping himself for magazine
and perhaps even newspaper writing. At the great world show in Hyde Park
of 1851 he humorously proposed to exhibit four three-volume novels, all
failures, but together furnishing a conclusive proof of industry. That was
before the one-volume success of The Warden. The triumphant discovery of
the line in which he could command success did not dispel some misgivings
as to the dropped stitches and the blank places in his education. These weak
points must be seen to without delay. So he sets his mother and his brother
Tom certain pieces of research work to do. First they were to hunt up
thirteen names, not biblical, of personal forces in the world’s history, beings
of unquestionable genius—great men, great women, great captains, and
great rebels. With the exception of the relatives now mentioned, Trollope
certainly never requisitioned friend or kinsfolk in this way. Throughout his
life he had two fears: first, lest he should write himself out; secondly, lest
the intellectual nourishment he took in should be unequal to the creative
effort of pen that he put forth. Hence, whether in Ireland, in Essex, or in
London, he always had a regular supply of books from Mudie’s. These, if
he did not look into them, he expected his wife, his niece, or some other
member of his home circle to read and to talk about to him. But in England,
as in Ireland, it was the Post Office servant who made the novelist.
While that process was going forward I first became known to Anthony
Trollope. Living, as a child, with my parents at Budleigh Salterton in South
Devon, I found one day the morning’s lessons interrupted by the
announcement that a strange gentleman who seemed in a hurry desired to
see my father at once. The visitor, then on his Post Office rounds in the
west, and known as the author of The Warden, and the visited had not seen
each other since the days when they were schoolboys at Winchester
together. The stranger, I can just recollect, as I watched him at our midday
dinner, seemingly added to his naturally large dimensions by a shaggy
overcoat, or it may have been a large, double-breasted pea-jacket, making
him look like one of those sea-captains about whom in the fifties we used to
hear a great deal on the Devonshire coast. Penny postage, with all its
intended benefits, was then, it must be remembered, on its trial. Every
corner of the western counties had been, or at the time referred to was
being, travelled over by Trollope for the purpose of ensuring the regular
delivery of letters throughout the kingdom, of inquiring into all complaints,
with a view of investigating the circumstances and removing the cause. This
official pilgrimage was for two reasons a landmark in Trollope’s course,
literary and official. It gave him all that he wanted in the way of human
varieties for peopling not only the pages of The Warden but, in their earlier
portions, of the other Barchester books. Secondly, it enabled him to show
that the public department he had entered as a youth of nineteen had now no
more active, alert, and resourceful servant than himself. He had for some
time reported the usefulness of roadside letter-boxes in France, and advised
their being tried in England. His proposal was experimentally adopted. On
his suggestion of the exact spot for the purpose, the first pillar-box was
erected at St. Heliers, Jersey, in 1853.
Four years after having created that monument of his official zeal and
skill, he improved on his success with The Warden by the appearance, in
1857, of Barchester Towers. On the additions made by this new story to the
group first seen in The Warden, it is needless here to dwell. Mr. Slope again
illustrates Trollope’s hereditary dislike of the average evangelical
clergyman. As for Slope’s patroness, Mrs. Proudie, Trollope’s apology for
her may be given here in his own words. These were first addressed to the
already mentioned James Pycroft, William Longman’s friend. “Before you
put her down as a freak of fancy, let me ask you one question. Review the
spiritual lords and their better halves such as you have known, and tell me
whether it is the bishop or the bishop’s wife who always takes the lead in
magnifying the episcopal office? If you and I live long enough, we shall see
an indefinite extension of the movement that has already created new sees
in Manchester and Ripon. In the larger and older sees there will be a cry
that the diocesan work is too heavy for one man; then will come the
demand for the revival of suffragan bishops. You now speak about the
higher and lower order of the clergy; you will then have a superior and
inferior class of prelates. If at some great country-house gathering there
happen to be a full-grown wearer of the mitre and his episcopal assistant,
you may expect to hear the hostess debating whether the suffragan should
have his seat at the dinner-table when the guests sit down, or whether his
chief might not prefer that he should come in afterwards with the children
and the governess to dessert. He, good easy man, may take it all meekly
enough, but not so his lady. When the suffragans are multiplied, human
nature will undergo some great revolution if the suffraganesses do not
contain a good many who are as fussy, as officious, as domineering, and ill-
bred as my chatelaine of the Barchester palace.”
“Boy, help me on with my coat.” Those were the only words I can
recollect Trollope addressing to me on the occasion just described. It was
not until the earliest years of my London work, that I heard his voice again.
He had then settled in or near London, and had vouchsafed me the
beginnings of an acquaintance which a little later was to grow into an
intimacy ended only by his death. During the seventies, my occupations
took me a great deal about different parts of the United Kingdom. One
November day, at Euston Station, he entered the compartment of the train in
which I was already seated, on some journey due north. Just recognising
me, he began to talk cheerily enough for some little time; then, putting on a
huge fur cap, part of which fell down over his shoulders, he suddenly asked:
“Do you ever sleep when you are travelling? I always do”; and forthwith,
suiting the action to the word, sank into that kind of snore compared by
Carlyle to a Chaldean trumpet in the new moon. Rousing himself up as we
entered Grantham, or Preston, Station, he next inquired: “Do you ever write
when you are travelling?” “No.” “I always do.” Quick as thought out came
the tablet and the pencil, and the process of putting words on paper
continued without a break till the point was reached at which, his journey
done, he left the carriage.
Several years later, when recalling this meeting, he told me that during
this journey he had added a couple of chapters to a serial story. Ever since
he had first turned novelist in Ireland, he had found himself too busy with
Post Office work to do much in the day, too tired and sleepy for anything
like a long spell of labour at night. He recollected having heard Sir Charles
Trevelyan speak of the intellectual freshness and capacity for prolonged
exertion felt by him when, having gone to bed an hour or so before
midnight, he woke up as long after. “Never,” said Sir Charles, “did my
brain seem clearer or stronger, and the work of minute writing easier or
better done than when, indisposed to sleep, I went through my papers, often
in the quiet which precedes the dawn.” The suggestion was no sooner made
than followed. At first Trollope exactly imitated Trevelyan, and, after a
short nap, worked for an hour or two, and then composed himself to
slumber again. By degrees he made the experiment of taking as much sleep
as he could by 5.30 A.M. Then, if he did not wake of his own accord, he was
called, in his early days by his old Irish groom, afterwards by another
servant. Coffee and bread and butter were brought to him in his dressing-
room. Then came the daily task of pen he had set himself. This
accomplished, if in London he mounted his horse for never less than a good
half-hour’s ride in Hyde Park before sitting down to the family breakfast as
nearly as possible at eleven. That left him with a comfortable sense of
necessary duty fulfilled, and the whole day lay before him for pleasure or
business, his chief afternoon amusement being a rubber at the Garrick.
 CHAPTER VII

ON AND OFF DUTY ROUND THE WORLD

Chafing in harness—“Agin the Government”—The Three Clerks—A

visit to Mrs. Trollope—Florentine visitors of note in letters and art
—A widened circle of famous friends—Diamond cut diamond—
Trollope’s new sphere of activity—In Egypt as G.P.O. ambassador
—Success of his mission—Doctor Thorne—Homeward bound—
Post and pen work by the way—North and south—The West Indies
and the Spanish Main—Carlyle’s praise of it—Castle Richmond and
some contemporary novels—An early instance of Thackeray’s
influence over Trollope’s writings—Famous editors and publishers
—The flowing tide of fortune.

T HE high-class Civil Service official is opposed to change. Trollope’s

constitutional conservatism shows itself in his sympathetic and
approving tolerance of those parts and personages in the ecclesiastical
polity generally held to call more than others for the reformer’s pruning-
knife. At the Post Office, towards the public, and the juniors of his
department, a martinet, Trollope never outgrew something of the rebel’s
readiness, on the slightest provocation, to rise against the powers that be.
His feud with Rowland Hill had become, during the later years of Hill’s
secretaryship, the talk of the office. During something like a quarter of a
century, in divers capacities and in many different parts of the world, he had
proved his strenuous, varied, self-sacrificing loyalty to the public service.
Yet uniform zeal for his work did not prevent him from sometimes
measuring swords with his chiefs. It was The Three Clerks, published in
1858, which, rather than any of the socio-clerical stories, first commended
Trollope to Thackeray as a story-teller. What specially attracted Thackeray
to this novel was its Katie Woodward, the best specimen of an English girl
which the author had yet drawn. The leading incidents passed for a satire
upon the scheme of competitive examinations then advocated chiefly by Sir
Charles Trevelyan, the undoubted Sir Gregory Hardlines of the story. This
element of caricature, and the outspoken criticism of the highest magnates,
had already roused much official and personal wrath, when the novelist
crowned his offence by orally preaching to the rank and file the duty of a
stout stand against the attack by the ruling powers not only on their clerkly
rights but their privileges as Englishmen.
At this time the Civil Service had not become a free profession. In one of
the great rooms of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Trollope collected and told
malcontents of the place that it was their duty to agitate till, outside office-
hours and in all personal relationships, they were as much their own masters
as if they had nothing to do with State employ. Mr. Secretary Rowland Hill
was at once up in arms. The firebrand who had thus tried to inflame the
worst passions of the Queen’s servants ought, he declared openly, to be
dismissed. These words, and the incidents which had led up to them,
eventually reached the Postmaster-General, then the second Lord
Colchester, a member of the Derby Government. The inflammatory speaker
was therefore sent for by the Minister, and told that the authorities of the
department were anxious to be relieved of his services. “Is your lordship,”
meekly asked Trollope, “prepared to dismiss me?” In reply Lord Colchester,
who, with his father’s Eldonian Toryism, combined a certain sense of
humour that his father did not possess, smiling oracularly, deprecated any
recourse to extremities. From that portion of his long duel with Rowland
Hill, Trollope consequently came forth with flying colours.
After such a triumph over his chief adversary, he thought he might allow
himself a little holiday. His mother still lived at Florence. This town, though
not becoming the national capital till 1864, had long been among the most
cosmopolitan, interesting, and pleasant of social centres in Europe. Many of
the names best known in Anglo-Saxon letters and art on both sides of the
Atlantic were habitual visitors or occasional residents. England had its
representatives in Elizabeth and Robert Browning, at their beautiful villa,
Casa Guidi, its outside a thicket of flowers whose fragrance could be
scented from afar, its interior a jungle of carpets and tapestry such as
Clytemnestra might have bade her lord to tread on his return from Troy.
Among other notable figures were E. C. Grenville Murray, of whom more
will be said hereafter, and Charles Lever, then recently appointed vice-
consul at Spezzia. In 1867 Lever became consul at Trieste, but neither his
earlier nor his later office prevented his constant reappearance among those
acquaintances on the Arno with whom, almost up to the time of his death in
1872, he appears specially at home and at his best in or out of his native
Dublin.
 One memorable experience Anthony Trollope brought away from his
visit to his mother at Florence. She took him to see Walter Savage Landor at
Fiesole. Their host some years earlier had appeared in Bleak House as
Boythorn, greatly, as was said, to his own indignation. As a fact, none
received more pleasure from the sketch than Landor himself. “Dickens,” he
said to young Trollope, “never did anything more life-like than when he
portrayed my superficial ferocity and inherent tenderness.” He then told his
visitors on no account to miss reading two works which he had recently
taken up, and had indeed to some extent rediscovered. One of these was
Hope’s Anastasius; the other was the work[12] by which Trelawny had made
his name, just a generation before Byronic associations widened his
notoriety, largely developed his anecdotal vein, and qualified him for sitting
to Thackeray for the portrait of Captain Sumphington. Of other famous
Anglo-Florentines Trollope saw much not only then, but afterwards. For the
Bleak House incident just described, exactly as I heard it from them, I am
indebted to two of these, the future Lord Houghton, then Monckton Milnes,
and Edward Smythe Pigott, who died, on the eve of the twentieth century,
dramatic censor, but at the time now looked back upon was a brilliant
young man of an old Somerset stock and of some fortune, just plunging into
literature and journalism. The acquaintance thus begun gradually ripened
into a lifelong intimacy. This gave Pigott the distinction of being one among
the very few who can have been almost simultaneously consulted, by two
nineteenth-century novelists so well known as Anthony Trollope and
George Eliot, about developments of plot and character in at least two
stories by each of these writers that eventually appeared about the same
time.
Through some of those already mentioned, Trollope made two
interesting additions to his acquaintances, either of which would have
sufficed to make his stay in Florence a thing to be remembered. One of
these was R. C. Trench, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, then on his
Italian travels; the other was Frederick Leveson-Gower, the late Lord
Granville’s brother, to whom he became subsequently indebted for much of
his insight into parliamentary and party matters, all utilised by him to the
full in his later political novels. Among the brethren of the brush on
pilgrimage to the capital of Italian art, J. E. Millais, long afterwards to
become Trollope’s friend and illustrator, was in Florence during Trollope’s
visit, but did not meet him then. Frederick Leighton and G. F. Watts,
however, were both for the first time seen by Trollope more than once
during a foreign trip, marking a distinct stage in his intellectual growth.
Watts at this time was a painter of established renown, having executed his
Westminster Hall cartoon of Caractacus in 1843. Leighton had made his
mark more recently, though it was on another Italian trip some years before
Trollope saw him that he had gathered local colour and inspiration for his
great picture of “Cimabue’s Madonna carried in procession through the
streets of Florence,” and bought by Queen Victoria in 1855.
In Florence too, when Trollope first saw it, were also other men of mark
and interest, with whom the acquaintance, then first made, grew afterwards
in England to familiar friendship. The first and only Lord Glenesk, at that
time Algernon Borthwick, proposed Trollope for the English Club. When
the two men dined there for the first time together, they were joined by
another famous Anglo-Tuscan, the then renowned correspondent of The
Morning Post, James Montgomery Stuart, always full of good stories,
especially about the twin literary leaders and rivals at the time, Carlyle and
Macaulay. One was to the following effect: Sixteen years after its
publication in The Edinburgh, Carlyle’s Frederick the Great wiped out
Macaulay’s estimate of the Prussian sovereign. Montgomery Stuart,
touching on the subject to Macaulay, whom he knew well, saw his face
suddenly crimson. Then came a torrent of invective against Carlyle, whose
writings Stuart was told to avoid as so much poison. As a novelist, Trollope
had not then gone beneath the surface for the cross-currents and the violent
eddies that disturb the waters of matrimonial life. He had a rare opportunity
of studying such incidents first hand during his stay under the shadow of
Brunelleschi’s Duomo; for the place then was known by the French as pre-
eminently the city of les femmes galantes, and was already not less
notorious than Paris itself as the abode of Anglo-Saxon couples detached,
semi-detached, or some time since wholly disunited. The already mentioned
Charles Lever, whose habitual absences at Florence from his Spezzia vice-
consulate would have cost him his post but for the unfailing entertainment
with which his vivacious reports furnished the Foreign Office, was far from
being the only old friend from Ireland to repeat on Italian soil the welcome
he had given on Irish to the same visitor just a generation earlier. Sir
William Gregory of Coole Park, and at least one of the Moyville
Vandeleurs, all from time to time shone forth in this pleasantest of Anglo-
Italian constellations.
 The trip now described so brightened Trollope himself as, in my old
friend Pigott’s words, to make him help Charles Lever towards keeping
Florence society in good spirits. It sent him back to England with a mind
full of fresh ideas and characters for his books. But at this locomotive epoch
Trollope was fond of applying to his own circumstances the words of
Tristram Shandy’s scullion: “We are here to-day, and there to-morrow.”
Before he could settle down to another novel, he was under marching orders
again. The truth is St. Martin’s-le-Grand now saw in Trollope not only a
capable servant but a seasoned and tactful man of the world, with the wit to
turn his cosmopolitan experiences into political as well as literary capital.
The service, thought Lord Colchester, still at the head of the department,
might as well get out of him, while he was there, all they could. Anthony
Trollope therefore found himself told off to the land of the Pharaohs under
circumstances that involve some reference to previous Anglo-Egyptian
relations. A new Anglo-Egyptian treaty was wanted. The chief Irish
surveyor, as Trollope then was, seemed to the rulers of St. Martin’s-le-
Grand the proper person to negotiate it. From Dublin, therefore, to London,
quick as steam could take him, the G.P.O. ambassador sped. Preoccupied
and overcharged with official affairs, he found time in the midst of
arrangements for his departure eastward, to plant the new novel which he
had just planned, Doctor Thorne, upon a publisher, not however on the new
Burlington Street house to which he had already mentioned it. Richard
Bentley, having first entertained Trollope’s terms, £400 down, for the book,
cried off. The figure, he said, must be reduced by at least one hundred. In
the case of the man with whom he had now to deal, it would have been
wiser to refuse the manuscript outright than to make any attempt at beating
down the author. The novelist at once told Mr. Bentley that, having changed
his terms, he need trouble himself to think no more of the matter. The
miscarriage of these negotiations was to have consequences more far-
reaching than could have been foreseen by Trollope himself. He at once
went to Chapman and Hall, then doing their business at 193 Piccadilly. The
senior partner, Edward Chapman, agreed to take Doctor Thorne at its
writer’s valuation. Thus began a connection noticeable alike in the annals of
that publishing house and in the career of Trollope himself.
The time taken by these little matters did not prevent Trollope’s reaching
Egypt on the appointed day. On his arrival at Cairo, the first thing that
struck Trollope, like most other new-comers to the place, and unfamiliar
with oriental sights, was the donkey-boys—who are, or were, to Cairo
much what commissionaires are to London—waiting at central points to
take messages and letters. Trollope had arranged for himself a little
programme of travel in the Near East. He did not therefore propose
lingering on the Nile a day longer than his mission absolutely required. One
of nineteenth-century Cairo’s social peculiarities noticed by Trollope was
the rarity of private or official addresses among native personages. Parcels
and papers were left for them at Shepheard’s or some other hotel, and
eventually came into their hands when they next happened to be passing
that way. The manager of the inn where Trollope put up, in reply to a
question about the residence or office of the Pasha’s minister with whom
the visitor’s business lay, assured him that anything left at the hotel bureau
could not fail to be placed before him. This did not at all accord with
Trollope’s ideas. He insisted on sallying forth at once with all the
documents; he had already ascertained in what direction he might encounter
or at least hear of the official whom he wanted. Approaching the first
donkey-boy visible in the street, he flung himself into the saddle and rode
off on his errand. The desired individual, however, remained for the present
out of sight.
On returning to his hotel, Trollope heard that his Excellency Nubar Bey
had called, and was waiting to see him. That able and urbane Armenian
statesman many years later became the Khedive Tewfik’s Prime Minister.
Received by him at Cairo in the eighties, I found he had not forgotten his
interviews with Trollope in 1858. Very pleasant, very conversational, but
somewhat peremptory had he found the author of the Barchester novels. “It
was, however,” continued Nubar, “some time before Mr. Trollope found
me, I fear, quite satisfactory; even then his manner of negotiating had about
it less of the diplomatist than of the author who might have meditated
scolding his publisher if he did not come round to his terms, and of carrying
his literary wares elsewhere.” The one difference between Nubar and his
visitor was the rate of speed at which the mails should be carried between
Alexandria and Suez. In pressing for a longer time than Trollope thought
necessary, the Egyptian official was suspected by the envoy from St.
Martin’s-le-Grand, as he himself said, and perhaps quite wrongly,[13] of
wishing to oblige the Peninsular and Oriental Company rather than the
British Government. The matter was soon adjusted in accordance with the
English view.
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