Visit https://ebookfinal.

com to download the full version and

explore more ebooks

New Men in Trollope s Novels Margaret Markwick

_____ Click the link below to download _____

https://ebookfinal.com/download/new-men-in-trollope-s-
novels-margaret-markwick/

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookfinal.com

Here are some suggested products you might be interested in.
Click the link to download

Trollope s Later Novels Robert Tracy

https://ebookfinal.com/download/trollope-s-later-novels-robert-tracy/

Knits for Men 20 Sweaters Vests and Accessories Margaret

Hubert

https://ebookfinal.com/download/knits-for-men-20-sweaters-vests-and-
accessories-margaret-hubert/

The Reasonable Man Trollope s Legal Fiction Coral Lansbury

https://ebookfinal.com/download/the-reasonable-man-trollope-s-legal-
fiction-coral-lansbury/

Wittgenstein s Novels Martin Klebes

https://ebookfinal.com/download/wittgenstein-s-novels-martin-klebes/
Performing the Everyday in Henry James s Late Novels Maya
Higashi Wakana

https://ebookfinal.com/download/performing-the-everyday-in-henry-
james-s-late-novels-maya-higashi-wakana/

Margaret Webster Milly S. Barranger

https://ebookfinal.com/download/margaret-webster-milly-s-barranger/

History of Men s Accessories A Short Guide for Men About

Town Nicholas Storey

https://ebookfinal.com/download/history-of-men-s-accessories-a-short-
guide-for-men-about-town-nicholas-storey/

Men of Influence Stalin s Diplomats in Europe 1930 1939

Sabine Dullin

https://ebookfinal.com/download/men-of-influence-stalin-s-diplomats-
in-europe-1930-1939-sabine-dullin/

The Hero of the Waverley Novels With New Essays on Scott

Expanded Edition Alexander Welsh

https://ebookfinal.com/download/the-hero-of-the-waverley-novels-with-
new-essays-on-scott-expanded-edition-alexander-welsh/
New Men in Trollope s Novels Margaret Markwick
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Margaret Markwick
ISBN(s): 9780754657248, 0754657248
Edition: Kindle
File Details: PDF, 2.09 MB
Year: 2007
Language: english
NEW MEN IN TROLLOPE’S NOVELS
 To John Letts,
who illuminated so many forgotten
corners of the Victorian age
1929–2006
New Men in Trollope’s Novels
Rewriting the Victorian Male

MARGARET MARKWICK
University of Exeter, UK
© Margaret Markwick 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Margaret Markwick has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Gower House Suite 420
Croft Road 101 Cherry Street
Aldershot Burlington, VT 05401-4405
Hampshire GU11 3HR USA
England

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Markwick, Margaret, 1945–
New men in Trollope’s novels : rewriting the Victorian male. –
(The nineteenth century)
1. Trollope, Anthony, 1815–1882 – Characters – Men
2. Trollope, Anthony, 1815–1882 – Criticism and
interpretation 3. Men in literature 4. Masculinity in literature
I. Title
823.8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Markwick, Margaret, 1945–
New men in Trollope’s novels : rewriting the Victorian male / by Margaret Markwick.
p. cm. – (Nineteenth century series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
(alk. paper)
1. Trollope, Anthony, 1815–1882–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Men in literature.
3. Masculinity in literature. I. Title.

PR5688.M44M37 2007
823’.8–dc22
2007008439

ISBN 978-0-7546-5724-8

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.
 Contents

General Editors’ Preface vii

List of Figures and Tables ix
Acknowledgements xi

Introduction: Trollope Past and Present 1

1 The Making of Victorian Manliness 15

2 Men in Fiction 37

3 Telling Masculinities 61

4 The Preux Chevalier: ‘Sans Peur et Sans Reproche’ 83

5 From Birth to Man’s Estate 101

6 Sex and the Single Man 117

7 Husbands, Fathers, Sons 141

8 Smoking Rooms: Bawdy Jokes 175

Trollope Editions used in this Book 199

Select Bibliography 201
Index 211
This page intentionally left blank
 The Nineteenth Century Series
General Editors’ Preface

The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of
interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent
years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our
understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres
primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature.
It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters
of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical
literature, travel writing, book production, gender and non-canonical writing. We are
dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy
is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and
both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by
the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories,
while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet
so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep,
and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of
its intellectual, artistic and social landscape.

Vincent Newey
Joanne Shattock
University of Leicester
This page intentionally left blank
 List of Figures and Tables

Figures

1.1 Punch Cartoon, December 10 1859 16

1.2 Tom Brown, the Archetypal Muscular Christian pays

Homage at Dr Arnold’s Tomb. (Macmillan, 1869) 31

5.1 The Infant Silverbridge Sits on his Great-uncle’s Knee.

(Virtue and Co, 1869) 107

6.1 Devices to Inhibit Masturbation and Nocturnal Arousal.

Taken from Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience
(Oxford University Press, 1984), facing p.183. 119

7.1 Distribution of Births in 1860 143

8.1 Plantagenet Palliser Perhaps Disguising – or Discovering

– ‘A New Vein in his Body’. (Elder and Co, 1864) 179

Tables

4.1 Manliness in The Duke’s Children 85

4.2 Men’s Appearance 90

5.1 Education 110

7.1 Family Structure 146

This page intentionally left blank
 Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to the University of Exeter, who

awarded me an honorary fellowship while I wrote this book. Professor Regenia
Gagnier has been a steady source of encouragement and support, and the library has
been constantly helpful and resourceful. In her capacity as visiting professor, Isobel
Armstrong’s advice on the structure of the opening paragraphs of chapter 3 was
invaluable. The great feminist Trollope scholar Deborah Denenholz Morse has also
been an inspiration to me when self-belief wavered. In this project, as in so many
in the past, Clare Bainbridge has unstintingly offered me her refreshing critique
of my ideas and composition. Robin Brierley has helped me to greater clarity in
understanding the deeper recesses of the male psyche. And the research for this book
would never have got off the ground without the enthusiasm, stimulation, affirmation
and encouragement of the late great Chris Brooks.
My greatest debt however, is to my husband Chris, who through my years of
pronounced physical disability was the most assiduous independent-living volunteer.
He has typed my script in all its revisions and has only rarely grumbled about my
handwriting. Trollope said that mistakes do not creep in, in ones and twos, they
march in, in battalions and in this book they are all my own.
A small amount of the material in this book has already been published as
‘Hands-on Fatherhood in Trollope’s Novels’, a chapter in Gender and Fatherhood in
the Nineteenth Century, edited by Helen Rogers and Trev Broughton (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2007) and appears with the kind permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

Trollope Past and Present

The women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s demanded equality in access to
education, jobs, pay, representation and health, with recognition for the value of child-
care, and an end to men’s physical and emotional abuse in their superior physical
strength and monetary power over women. In scrutinising sexual inequalities, in
examining the skewed valorisation of men’s behaviours, a great deal of enquiry
concentrated on man as dysfunctional. The term ‘emotionally illiterate’ became
short-hand for all the anti-social tendencies which tend to be found more often in
men than women, with hooliganism and violence at one end of the spectrum and
keeping one’s emotions firmly under wraps at the other.
There were few areas of life that were untouched by the insistence of these voices.
Was it true that the pursuit of corporate power inexorably atrophied men’s nurturing
selves? Was the lawlessness found in groups of teenage boys indeed the end product
of a generation of boys raised with distant, disengaged fathers who had never taught
their sons how to be men? The late 1970s and 1980s were marked by a consequent
formation of a men’s movement, as men addressed the charges that they suppressed
meaningful feeling, lacked emotional resources, feared intimacy and left little room
for tenderness. This fed the development of masculinity studies, which are now a
vigorous field of study in the humanities.
Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics,1 which was published in the summer of 1970, and
which dissects the sub-texts of a group of major novels written by men is, arguably,
responsible for changing for ever the nature of literary criticism.2 In exposing
the masculinist assumptions and attitudes of D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Jean
Genet and Norman Mailer, Millet gave the academic profession a new imperative
vocabulary for the deconstruction of familiar texts. Feminist critical theory revealed
new insights in old texts when they were subjected to gender-sensitive enquiry. By
foregrounding women, the pertinence of theories in a wide range of disciplines was
shown to have been skewed by an unquestioning masculinist approach. Over the
ensuing years, it became the norm to establish Schools of Women’s Studies where
the canon across the humanities – sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy,
history and literary studies – was reassessed. Schools of Women’s Studies set out to
expose masculinist patterns of thinking and to establish a woman’s canon.3

1
Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970).
2
See, for instance, Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (London:
Aurum Press, 2000) 43 and 148–51.
3
See, for instance, Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel: 100 good women writers before
Jane Austen (London: Pandora Press, 1986).
2 New Men in Trollope’s Novels
Initially they were the enclave of women. However, as the wider implications
of the women’s movement were acknowledged by a growing number of men, so
increasingly did men recognise that the methods developed by Women’s Studies
analysis could, with equal potency, be applied to examine the cultural defining of
masculinity. This gave rise to a plethora of studies about masculinity which reached
industrial proportions by the 1990s. Lynne Segal’s 1997 revised introduction to her
1990 Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, declares that there were
400 new books on masculinity published in the previous ten years, ranging over all
disciplines.4 Her own book has a socio-psychological perspective. David Gilmour’s
Manhood in the Making (1990) combines a sociological and anthropological view.5
Gerald Fogel’s collection of essays in The Psychology of Man: Psychoanalytic
Perspectives (1996),6 uses a psychological approach, while David Rosen examines a
variety of texts from Beowulf to Sons and Lovers in constructing masculinity within
a framework of critical theory in Changing Fictions of Masculinity (1993).7 John
Tosh clearly articulates the impoverishment of historiology caused by the absence
of a gender-sensitive approach in A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class
Home in Victorian England (1998).8 Anthony Clare, from his psychiatrist’s chair, has
written On Men: Masculinity in Crisis (2000).9 Coming from an entirely different
perspective (described by Segal as ‘mytho-poetic’) is Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990),
a text which examines man’s need to return to tribal patterns of initiation rites.10
Today, Schools of Gender Studies offer an arena to everyone interested in exploring
the cultural determinations of sexuality, be it male, female, gay or lesbian.
One of the first tasks of the women’s school of literary criticism was to reappraise
the existing canon and reinterpret the delineation of women’s lives in these texts.
Elaine Showalter,11 and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,12 are outstanding in their
authoritative approach to this task. When the Victorian novel was subjected to
particular scrutiny, Trollope’s work proved to be a remarkably fruitful field of feminist
study, because of some unexpected depths that were revealed. The new approach of
feminist critics uncovered a Trollope who writes about strong-minded women in touch
with their sexuality. Trollope’s women refuse to conform to the cultural demands of

4
Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (London: Virago
Press, 1997) xii.
5
David Gilmour, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity
(New Haven: Yale University Press 1990).
6
Gerald Fogel, Frederick Lane and Robert Liebert, eds, The Psychology of Man:
Psychoanalytic Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
7
David Rosen, The Changing Fictions of Masculinity (Urbana and Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1993).
8
John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian
England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999).
9
Anthony Clare, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000).
10
Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1990).
11
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to
Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
12
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic and the Woman Writer
and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
 Trollope Past and Present 3
their times (and certainly to our stereotypes of what those cultural demands were)
and he can bleakly expose the paucity of their choices. That he manages to present
his subversive message about women’s position, while on the surface appearing to
support the status quo, is just one aspect of Trollope’s particular subtlety.
It is now time to re-read Trollope’s novels to reassess how he constructs his men,
for he can be equally unconventional in his presentation of the cultural stereotype
of the orthodox male psyche. This quest to re-discover Trollope’s men will examine
how the Victorians themselves constructed masculinity. Who were the great arbiters
on how a man should comport himself and who of these can be detected influencing
how Trollope shaped his men? The industrial revolution fuelled a debate about the
operation of man in the market-place. Men like Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo,
Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham strove to establish a vocabulary with which to
explore their new thinking about the structure of society and the nature of cash and
capitalism. The diction that emerged, devoid of sentiment and excluding a moral
dimension, has been interpreted by many as masculinist. The tenor of their writings was
confronted by the ethical asceticism of Thomas Carlyle and tempered by the populist
writings of Samuel Smiles. Meanwhile there was an overarching ecclesiastical debate
which set the evangelical low church against the high Anglicanism of Pusey, with
a powerful voice urging a moderate middle way, led by F.D. Maurice and Charles
Kingsley, but drawing heavily on the theologies of Dr Thomas Arnold and Samuel
Coleridge. These four commentators spoke explicitly about Christian manliness and
led directly to the formation of the movement for muscular Christianity.13 These
were all topical themes that were explored in much of the popular fiction of the time
and have contributed to our view of who the Victorians were.
Just as we cling to myths about the Victorians in general, so there is a powerful
and persistent myth about Trollope that resists confrontation with certifiable facts.
There is a standard view that after an inauspicious start with his first three novels,
his fourth novel, The Warden, published in 1856, met with some critical acclaim.
He consolidated his reputation with his next four books and it was an indicator of
his success and popularity that his next novel, Framley Parsonage, was the opening
serial in the prestigious Cornhill Magazine, which made its first appearance on
23 December 1860. Through the 1960s, he was the matinee idol of the circulating
library and book-reading public, publishing 23 novels, travel books and volumes of
short stories in a decade. E.S. Dallas famously wrote:

He is at the top of the tree; he stands alone, there is nobody to be compared with him. He
writes faster than we can read, and the more that the pensive public reads, the more does
it desire to read. Mr. Anthony Trollope is, in fact, the most fertile, the most popular, the
most successful author – that is to say, of the circulating library sort.14

That final qualification, a significant put-down, foreshadowed, so the story goes, the
falling off of his popularity through the 1870s, either because public tastes changed,

13
This is the subject of Norman Vance’s definitive study, The Sinews of the Spirit (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Chapter 1 in particular draws largely on his argument.
14
Anthony Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1969) 103; E.S. Dallas, The Times 23 May 1859: 12, but quoted widely.
4 New Men in Trollope’s Novels
or Trollope’s books changed. By the time of his death in 1882, the price he could
command for a novel had halved and his autobiography, published posthumously
in 1883, with its frank declaration that he wrote to a timetable, saw writing as no
different from shoe-making, and was proud of the money he made, put paid to
what faltering loyalty remained and he sank into obscurity.15 His reputation rallied
in the 1920s thanks to the efforts of Michael Sadleir and he experienced a further
renaissance during the second world war as the comfort zone for a besieged nation
seeking the reassurance of an age of certainty. As V.S. Pritchett wrote in 1946:

Since 1918, Trollope has become one of the Great Air Raid Shelters. He presides over
the eternal Munich of the heart, and Barsetshire has become one of the great never-never
lands of our time. It has been the normal country to which we all aspire.16

Any remaining aspiration to serious recognition was firmly squashed by F.R. Leavis
in The Great Tradition (1948)17 and Stephen Spender is thought to have reflected the
views of most people with any literary pretensions when he said, in 1966, that he
had never read the Palliser novels and he did not think that anyone in the Department
of English at U.C.L. had either.18 As if to emphasise that this was the official
version, Terry Eagleton wrote that Trollope’s work ‘bathes in a self-consistent,
blandly undifferentiated ideological space’, whose aesthetic is ‘an anaemic, naively
representational “realism”, which is merely a reflex of common-place bourgeois
empiricism’.19
R.C. Terry,20 James Kincaid and N. John Hall21 are in the vanguard of those who
have vigorously rebutted this account. In The Artist in Hiding (1977), Terry produces
concrete evidence of Trollope’s unfading popularity with the reading public in the years
after his death, by examining the stock records of Mudie’s circulating library. In 1888,
six years after his death, far from suffering a decline, 49 of his works were available on
Mudie’s subscription, and 12 years later, in 1900, 52 titles were being offered, implying
that it was not just his novels, but his minor works as well that were being requested by
his readers.22 As Terry points out, the speed with which Julia Kavanagh, Anne Manning
and Elizabeth Sewell dropped out of the listings demonstrates that Mudie only stocked
what was in demand. Terry also draws our attention to the number of new editions
and re-editions of the novels that continued to appear, here and in America, in the 20
15
For the account list of Trollope’s earnings as a writer, see An Autobiography, 363–4.
16
V.S. Pritchett, New Statesman 8 June 1946, 415, quoted by Donald D. Stone, Oxford
Reader’s Companion to Trollope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 130.
17
F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1948).
18
Quoted by James R. Kincaid, The Novels of Anthony Trollope (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977) 175, taken from a column in Radio Times, 24–30 May 1974.
19
Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London:
New Left Books, 1976), 181, quoted by Bill Overton, The Unofficial Trollope (Brighton:
Harvester Press, 1982) 1.
20
R.C. Terry, Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding (London: Macmillan, 1977).
21
N. John Hall, ‘The Truth about Trollope’s “Disappearance”’, Trollopiana 22 (1993)
4–12; drawn from Hall’s lecture ‘Finding Anthony Trollope’, British Museum (August 1993).
22
See particularly Terry, chapter 3, 48–65, and appendix V, 261.
 Trollope Past and Present 5
years after Trollope’s death. John Lane started producing the novels in the New Pocket
Library edition in 1904 and the Oxford University Press began its World’s Classics
series in 1907, which continues to this day.23 While some of the novels have been
rarer than others (Rachel Ray, The Macdermots of Ballycloran and The Fixed Period,
for instance) a good proportion of his novels have been continuously in print from
their publication to the present day, and all were republished in paperback through the
1990s by Penguin and Oxford University Press.
Lance Tingay notes how readily recognised and how popular were radio adaptations
of Trollope’s novels through the 1940s and 1950s, targeting an audience already
familiar with his work.24 The 1970s saw a lavish BBC television serial production of
the story of Glencora and Plantaganet Palliser and the 1980s the recreation of the first
two novels of the Barchester series. The Way We Live Now was dramatised by Andrew
Davies for BBC2, and broadcast in 2001 with an all-star cast, and in 2004, He Knew
He Was Right received the same treatment. The Trollope Society, inaugurated in 1987
to produce the first complete uniform edition of his novels in partnership with the Folio
Society, together have printed around 12,000 copies of each novel in their expensively-
bound volumes of his fiction.25 This bears little relation to the myth which has been
peddled and which can still be found in circulation today.26
His critical reputation has similarly opposing tellings and may indeed throw
some light on the misleading impression not only that people stopped reading him at
his death, but that he was somehow not a writer of the first water.
David Skilton gives a lucid and thoughtful appraisal of critical opinion on Trollope
through the years of his writing career in Trollope and his Contemporaries (1972)27
and the following paragraphs draw heavily on his marshalling of his material. He
shows how, in spite of Trollope’s demonstrably enduring popularity in the hearts of

23
Terry, 53.
24
Lance O. Tingay, ‘Trollope’s Popularity: A Statistical Approach’, Nineteenth Century
Fiction, vol. 11, No. 3, 1956: 223–9.
Radio adaptations of the novels:
The Warden 1942 and 1948
Barchester Towers 1943 and 1951
Framley Parsonage 1944
Doctor Thorne 1945
The Last Chronicle of Barset 1945 and 1951
Orley Farm 1945 and 1947
The Vicar of Bullhampton 1947
The Small House at Allington 1948 and 1949
Dr Wortle’s School 1949
Is He Popenjoy? 1949
The Eustace Diamonds 1952
The Prime Minister 1955
25
Information from Anthony Juckes, editor of The Trollope Society, Nov. 2001.
26
Reviewing Markwick, Trollope and Women in Victorian Studies, Spring 1998,
523–8, Lynette Felber says: ‘ ... his value for academic study is unfortunately still deprecated.
As a dissertator in the late 1980s, I was told that it would be difficult to pull any meaningful
patterns out of Trollope’s “chatty” novels’ (523).
27
David Skilton, Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries (London: Longmans, 1972).
6 New Men in Trollope’s Novels
the reading public, his critical acclaim vacillated. While the critics of the early novels
from The Warden onwards largely welcomed the newcomer to the fold, by the time
he hit his stride in the 1860s, when his novels were coming out thick and fast, many
commentators had a sniping edge to their views. Their grumbles focused on their
misappreciation of his use of realism, but they were also flummoxed by how to keep
writing something new about a novelist whose output demanded a review every few
months. His greatest sin was his popularity and the reviewers seemed reluctant to
praise something that seemed so easy to do. Trollope’s insistence that writing novels
was like making shoes seemed like ‘low art’. Instead they claimed that his ‘realism’
was too much founded in the mundane, too often about what was all too clearly
around them, with nothing of the sublime. The British Quarterly Review said:

Like all Mr Trollope’s writings, [He Knew He Was Right] is uncompromisingly

realistic – the flaws of his heroes and heroines are remorselessly exhibited. It is no
justification of this Pre-Raphaelitism that it is true to life. A work of art should not be true
to life, but should idealise – that it may elevate it.28

R.H. Hutton, writing widely about constructions of ‘realism’, regularly contrasts

Trollope with Charlotte Brontë at one end of the spectrum, and with George Eliot at
the other, but fails to find the measure of Trollope’s genius by using such idiosyncratic
practitioners as his yardstick. However, of all Trollope’s contemporary reviewers,
Hutton came the nearest to recognising Trollope’s original genius:

Mr Trollope’s intellectual grasp of his characters ... is nearly perfect; but then he chooses to
display that grasp almost exclusively in the hold they get, or fail to get over other characters,
and in the hold they yield to other characters over them. It is in his command of what we
may call the moral ‘hooks and eyes’ of life that Mr Trollope’s greatest power lies.29

It was nearly 100 years after Hutton’s incisive analysis before anyone refocused on
this quality and made a full study of it. It is true that his later books commanded
lower prices, though he was still paid between six and seven times the going rate of
around £250.30 After his death, and the publication of his remaining extant works,
there was a slight lull in the outpouring of critical assessment, but it was well under
way again by the 1890s, and has never stopped.
Ambivalence to Trollope held sway for many years. Henry James is most famous
for his Janus-like appraisal. He denounced Trollope’s ‘suicidal satisfaction’ in
reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only make-believe,31 while
declaring that as a realist, Trollope was breaking new ground with the French School.32

28
Smalley, 333 (British Quarterly Review, 1869, L, 263–4), quoted by Skilton, 88.
29
Smalley, 198 (The Spectator, 1864, xxxvii, 421–3); Skilton refers closely to this
passage in his chapter analysing Hutton’s contribution to the body of Trollope criticism
(100–125 and particularly 114).
30
John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (London: Macmillan,
1995) 161, says that the average payment for a novel was around £250.
31
Henry James, ‘Anthony Trollope’, Century Magazine (New York, 1883 n.s. iv, 388–95)
Smalley, 525–45, 535.
32
Smalley, 529.
 Trollope Past and Present 7
At the turn of the century, in an otherwise appreciative essay, Frederic Harrison
apologised for including so unfashionable a novelist as Trollope in his survey of early
Victorian fiction.33 George Saintsbury, as Skilton points out, is bent on sabotaging the
reputations of the previous generation34 and Trollope falls under his wide-sweeping
scythe, ‘proof that powers of observation are not enough if a writer lacks genius’.
He recanted in later life.35 Two years later, in 1897, Herbert Paul declared Trollope’s
books to be dead, only to be rebutted four years later by Leslie Stephen declaring
that he was not dead, but in a state of suspended vitality.36 Stephen’s analysis posits
Trollope as an analgesic to numb the stresses of the world, ‘a genial, peaceful world,
oblivious to the intellectual, political and social revolution that was in the air’.37
The brickbats continued; the commentators might disagree on exactly how low
was their estimation of his art, but he was always there needing to be brushed aside.
However the critics were never indifferent to him, which would have been the true
death. This may of course be a reaction to their perplexity in accounting for his
continuing popularity among readers. Terry, after all, demonstrates that in 1900,
Mudie’s had more Trollope books on their shelves than at any other time.
His critical fortunes in the twentieth century teetered on a similar knife-edge
of ambiguity, as some critics were spurred on to patronise him with faint praise,
while others staunchly attempted to address his genius. W.P. Ker in 1912 reiterated
Trollope’s genius for a realism as innovative as Balzac’s.38 In 1913, drawing heavily
on his own recollections and those of his contemporaries, T.H.S. Escott published
a partial biography.39 This was somewhat balanced by the more accurate record of
his life written by Sadleir in 1927,40 but his painstaking work of bibliography and
biography is marred by his patronising tone as he declares that Trollope is not from
the top drawer of British novelists, merely one of the best of the rest. Lord David
Cecil, in 1934 continued to cocker up this by now tired cliché,41 while the reading
public turned to him in ever greater numbers through the 1930s and 1940s.
The end of the war marks the beginning of some serious academic respect and
acclaim for Trollope’s work, a sea change indicated by the establishment in September
1945 of The Trollopian, a quarterly journal from the University of California.42 Its self-

33
Frederic Harrison, Studies in Early Victorian Literature (London: Edward Arnold,
1910) 183.
34
Skilton, 102.
35
George Saintsbury, Corrected Impressions (1895) 172–7, quoted by Stone, 129.
36
Stone, 129.
37
Stone, 129.
38
Stone, 129.
39
T.H.S. Escott, Anthony Trollope: His Work, Associates, and Literary Originals
(London: John Lane 1913).
40
Michael Sadleir, Trollope: A Commentary (London: Constable, 1927).
41
Lord David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation (London:
Constable, 1934).
42
The Trollopian was founded by Bradford Booth, who wrote Anthony Trollope, Aspects
of his Life and Art (London: Hutton, 1958). Booth, in spite of his enthusiasms, could be as
patronising as any of the detractors. Kincaid quotes him saying: ‘His work resists the kind of
formal analysis to which we subject our better fiction’ (Preface).
8 New Men in Trollope’s Novels
professed purpose was to provide a platform for the informed discussion of the Trollope
oeuvre and associated subjects. It rapidly broadened its remit, in March 1947, to become
Nineteenth Century Fiction (and more recently, in 1986, Nineteenth Century Literature)
and it has consistently discharged its brief. While the efforts of this august body of
opinion were insufficient to swamp entirely the voices of Spender and Eagleton referred
to earlier, such views were the last vestiges of a body of opinion facing extinction. Today,
Trollope’s reputation as a great novelist and fertile field for research is unshakeable.
This is due in no small measure to a raft of scholarly research from which a more
complex view of Trollope’s creative processes began to emerge. A.O.J. Cockshut’s
Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study (1955) gives us the first detailed full-chapter analysis
of individual books, and he is prepared to go outside the core works of the Barchester
Chronicles and the Palliser novels, examining An Eye for an Eye, Dr Wortle’s School,
Kept in the Dark, and Mr Scarborough’s Family to support his thesis of a shift in the
novels around 1870 to a darker view of life.43 Cockshut initiated the shift of perspective
necessary to deepen readings of his texts, to change who Trollope was widely thought
to be and while Bradford Booth’s Jamesian Trollope: Aspects of his Art and Life (1956)
still tended to support earlier views of limited genius, Mario Praz in The Hero in Eclipse
(1956) makes it clear that Trollope is at last being taken seriously.44
By the 1970s, Trollope study had the feel of being a conveyor-belt production
line.45 In 1968, Hillis Miller’s The Form of Victorian Fiction gave us another view of
the novelist as dark and subversive.46 In 1969, Trollope was the fifth literary giant to
receive the Critical Heritage treatment, beaten only by Austen, James, Tennyson and
Thackeray. In the English canon, Trollope is now clearly in the vanguard.
Ruth apRoberts set the tone for the 1970s with Trollope: Artist and Moralist.
She begins with a brief account of how all commentators like Sadleir and Cecil have
ill-served Trollope. While she acknowledges Sadleir’s bibliographic scholarship,
she says ‘there are nevertheless qualities in Sadleir’s work that have vitiated the
study of Trollope ... His delighted connoisseurship impedes actual analysis ...
however much Sadleir actually admires Trollope, he has a basically condescending
attitude’.47 She goes on to demonstrate how the yardsticks established by James,
Lubbock and Leavis prove inadequate and resistant to Trollope’s style and points
to Wayne Booth’s theories of narratology set out in The Rhetoric of Fiction48 as
the way forward. He has, she says: ‘enfranchised us from the yoke of Jamesian
formalism’ and freed us to be able to analyse what it is in Trollope’s narratives that
make him so deeply satisfying.49 In her chapter ‘The Shaping Principle’, she re-reads
The Warden without the previous generation’s shackles to reveal the conscious and

43
A.O.J. Cockshut, Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study (London: Collins, 1955) 9.
44
Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, trans. Angus Davidson (London:
Oxford University Press, 1956).
45
The British Library catalogue lists 13 works published on Trollope between 1975 and 1979.
46
Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press,
1968).
47
Ruth apRoberts, Trollope: Artist and Moralist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971) 13.
48
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961 (revised and republished London:
Penguin Books, 1983).
49
apRoberts, 27.
 Trollope Past and Present 9
subtle structures of this early work. She blows away the cobwebs of ‘the persistent
tradition that Trollope is a naive writer, that he has no control over his material, and
that his material serves to give him away’.50 In its place we have a Trollope who
consciously and artistically layers the construction of his protagonists. ‘Trollope’,
she says, ‘insists on the incongruities by sharp juxtaposition of different perspectives.
This is the function of his “realism”’. In this, she picks up the threads identified by
Hutton 100 years previously.51
The space that opened up in the wake of apRoberts’ deconstruction of his technique
was readily filled by, most notably, Terry’s The Artist in Hiding and Kincaid’s
The Novels of Anthony Trollope, both weighty pieces of scholarship constructing
a Trollope whose distinctive and innovative use of realism put him on a par with
Flaubert and Zola. Kincaid argues that Trollope was both tied to and separated from
the realist tradition: ‘He had little in common with his great contemporaries: the real
ties are backwards to Jane Austen and forwards to late James and Virginia Woolf.’52
Terry likens Trollope’s realism to the full detail of the paintings of his friend Frith:

It is an art that depends on time, space, and cumulative effect … The Trollopian mode of
undramatic disclosure is a process of gradual revelation through the many insignificant actions
and a host of tiny observations which, with the author’s genial presence as commentator and
host, creates a sense of well-being and ease, like opening one’s own front door.53

This has echoes of Virginia Woolf’s, ‘We believe in Barsetshire as we believe in our
weekly bills’.54
Both Kincaid and Terry retell a selection of novels in the light of their theses of
enhanced reality. Both of them are sceptical of Cockshut’s neat compartmentalising.
Trollope is much more slippery than that, says Terry, and their methodologies
have been taken up by most serious commentators since. Special mention needs
to be made of Michael Riffaterre’s outstanding essay on Trollope’s metonymies, a
meticulous examination of his tropes, focusing on food in Rachel Ray in particular,
which cemented Trollope in that canon of works whose sub-texts are susceptible to
the close examination of the great twentieth century structuralists.55
Millet’s Sexual Politics, with its exposé of the misogyny of the great male writers
of the twentieth century, insisted on a re-evaluation of many earlier certitudes,
including those held in every dusty corner of the Academy and her work encouraged a
re-interpretation of Trollope’s themes in the light of feminist theory. Juliet McMaster’s
Trollope’s Palliser Novels (1978), is the first of these.56 Her declared intention is to

50
apRoberts, 35.
51
apRoberts, 34–44.
52
Kincaid, 51.
53
Terry, 94.
54
Virginia Woolf, ‘Phases of Fiction’, Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1966–1967)
vol. 2, 57.
55
Michael Riffaterre, ‘Trollope’s Metonymies’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, vol. 37,
1982: 272–92.
56
Juliet McMaster, Trollope’s Palliser Novels: Theme and Pattern (London: Macmillan,
1978).
10 New Men in Trollope’s Novels
explore the six Palliser novels and The Small House at Allington, where we first
meet Plantaganet Palliser, to establish a unity of theme. Her re-telling of the plots
and sub-plots (and she points out that she is unusual in giving prominence to sub-
plots) foregrounds the action of the women. This opens out a new fertile and insightful
interpretation of the Trollope oeuvre, even though she posits no explicit feminist agenda.
She opens the way for further analyses that were more rigorously feminist in their
approach. Deborah Denenholz Morse’s Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels, of 1987,
specifically challenges earlier masculinist interpretations. She refutes Sadleir, who
claimed that Trollope’s ideal woman is ‘modest of mien, low voiced; claiming nothing
of equality’ and Praz, who said: ‘Trollope’s novels are designed to encourage gentle,
modest, not very passionate girls’, amongst others, as a backdrop to a study exploring
Trollope’s subversive sub-text as he exposes the paucity of women’s choices.57 Terry
and Kincaid both noticed, but only in passing, that there was ambiguity in Trollope’s
characterisation of his women. Their sketchy anomalies become integrated themes in
Trollope’s plots when examined with a gender-specific hand.
This is particularly relevant to Morse, who analyses both plot and sub-plot in The
Prime Minister from the point of view of the female protagonist. She comments:

Both stories are about a woman’s attempt to gain some sense of herself, to create a
distinctive identity ... the struggles of both women are sympathetically chronicled,
with the result that the subversive implications of the narrative conflict with the novel’s
conclusion. This tension seems to reflect Trollope’s ambivalence about the cultural ideals
of femininity that the book indirectly questions, but eventually upholds.58

Morse, in analysing what Glencora actually says, discovers a woman questioning

her capacity to commit her life to a husband, when they are of such disparate natures:
‘These statements through the Palliser novels, spoken by the woman Trollope most
admires, undermine all those fictional Victorian heroines who sacrifice themselves
in order to be the salvation of some erring man.’59
Morse’s balanced and measured re-telling of the plots from the point of view of
the female protagonists in the Palliser novels is taken up by Jane Nardin in He Knew
She Was Right: the Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope, where she
pursues similar themes in the novels written in the first half of his career, but with a
much more hard-line agenda. Nardin argues that after Doctor Thorne and Framley
Parsonage, Trollope began to undercut the conventions of comic form and turned to
a form of black comedy which subverted the Victorian notions of male and female,
perhaps echoing Cockshut’s earlier study.60 Priscilla Walton’s 1995 extreme approach
leads her to an entirely different conclusion. Her Patriarchal Desire and Victorian
Discourse: A Lacanian Reading of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels attempts to
apply a Lacanian discourse to a reading of Trollope as a masculinist writer pushing

57
Deborah Denenholz Morse, Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels (Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1987) 1.
58
Morse, 83.
59
Morse, 97.
60
Jane Nardin, He Knew He Was Right: The Independent Woman in the Novels of
Anthony Trollope (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1989) Intro. xvii.
 Trollope Past and Present 11
61
patriarchal power. Whereas Morse and Nardin argue, in varying degrees, for a Trollope
whose books empathise with woman’s plight and reveal poorly acknowledged truths
about the position of women at the time, Walton brings the wheel round full circle. She
constructs a Trollope who conforms to the stereotype of the male novelist wielding his
phallocentric pen to consolidate patriarchy. Ironically, Walton’s reading brings us back
to the pre-feminist era of Trollopian dominant men and compliant women and serves
to emphasise the need for a genderised study of the novels examining his men.
Historical constructions of masculinities and particularly Victorian masculinities,
have been a recognised area of study for 40 years. David Newsome’s Godliness
and Good Learning in 1961 is one of the earliest62 and the standard work is widely
accepted to be Norman Vance’s The Sinews of the Spirit, published in 1985. This has
been followed by, among others, Mangan and Walvin’s Manliness and Morality:
Middle Class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800–1940, in 1987,63 and Donald
Hall’s Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age of 1994.64 Historians
are now beginning to reassess our understanding of what it was to be a man in the
nineteenth century through genderised filters. Here Tosh leads the field. His informal
study group, begun in 1988, produced the papers edited by him and Michael Roper
and published as Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London,
1991).65 This has been followed by his influential and originative work, A Man’s
Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (1999).
Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain (2005)66 flags up further
areas that cry out for gender-sensitive appraisal, notably Empire and emigration.
Another avenue of study explores masculinity as a problem area of social
functioning. Adrienne Burgess’s Fatherhood Reclaimed lucidly reviews the changes
in opinion and belief about fatherhood over the past 400 years and points the way
forward for men to re-assert themselves as effective and nurturing parents.67 There
has been a welter of self-help books; Steve Biddulph, a family therapist whose early
books on child care were more gender-neutral, has now written entire books on
maleness as a problem area; Raising Boys was published in 199768 and Manhood in
1998.69 These commentators are sharing the re-positioning of a newer understanding
of masculinity within the context of how masculinity has been understood in the

61
Priscilla L. Walton, Patriarchal Desire and Victorian Discourse: A Lacanian Reading
of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1995).
62
David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning (London: Murray, 1961).
63
Mangan and Walvin, eds, Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in
Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).
64
Donald E. Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
65
Michael Roper and John Tosh, eds, Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since
1800 (London: Routledge, 1991).
66
John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain (Harlow:
Pearson Education, 2005).
67
Adrienne Burgess, Fatherhood Reclaimed: The Making of the Modern Father
(London: Vermillion Press, 1997).
68
Steve Biddulph, Raising Boys (London: Thorsons, 1998).
69
Steve Biddulph, Manhood (London: Hawthorne Press, 1998).
12 New Men in Trollope’s Novels
past and advance the thesis that men will enhance their experiences when they
embrace their nurturing selves. This is particularly relevant to a re-examination of
Trollope in the light of new thinking about men today, where attentiveness to the
contemporary manhood debate heightens our sensitivity to Trollope’s nineteenth-
century appreciation of just these issues.
The ‘new man’ construct rapidly filtered into popular culture. An early sighting
was Kramer vs Kramer, Robert Benton’s 1977 film, where a big-noise advertising
executive turns to raising his seven year old when his wife leaves him.70 It all ends in
tears when his ex-wife successfully sues for custody. Tony Parson’s best-seller Man
and Boy re-works the same story, but 20 years on, Parsons’s protagonist recognises
the importance of conciliation, rather than indulging in man’s angry pain.71
Evidence of men expressing their masculinity through their nurturing side became
increasingly commonplace through the end of the 1990s. In Britain, broadsheet
newspapers ran columns promoting hands-on fatherhood. Tim Dowling wrote a
weekly column ‘Man’s World’ for The Independent on Sunday from late 1998 to
2000, where he diaried the day-to-day challenges of a man grappling with the child-
care of three little boys under five. For a while it seemed as though a baby in a
mini version of the team’s strip was every footballer’s fashion accessory, as Dennis
Wise took his six-month old up to receive the FA Cup for Chelsea in May 2000 and
David Beckham got hauled over the coals for missing a Manchester United training
session because he had been up all night with his infant son Brooklyn. Martin
Johnson, captain of England’s 2003 World Cup-winning rugby team, has written an
autobiography which gives masculinist fulfilment to every stereotype of the bruised
and bruising hard man’s game, but he takes time out from that narrative to articulate
his deep feelings of grief at the death of his mother and his great joy and satisfaction
in the physical care of his new-born baby daughter.72
Of all the novelistic examinations of male angst in the 1990s, probably Nick
Hornby’s have been the most revealing of the darker recesses of a man’s psyche. His
three fictions, Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About a Boy, though in no sense a trilogy,
do, when examined together, display a unity and completeness in the exploration of
how men come adrift in forging permanent relationships with women and of the
areas of their functioning which can become blocks to good understanding.73
In his fictions, Nick Hornby constructs a masculinity which posits emotional
closeness and commitment as the route to a happier and fulfilled life. Fever Pitch’s
protagonist increasingly comes to realise how his obsession with Arsenal excludes
him from significant interaction with his friends. In High Fidelity, it finally dawns on
Rob that if he wants to be happy and fulfilled in his life, he has to make a permanent
commitment to Laura, instead of responding to every competing flicker of sexual
attraction to each woman he meets. These themes are developed further in About

70
Kramer vs. Kramer, dir. Robert Barton, perf. Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, 1977.
71
Tony Parsons, Man and Boy (London: Harper Collins, 1999).
72
Martin Johnson, Martin Johnson The Autobiography (London: Headline, 2003),
184–7, 205 and 329.
73
Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch, 1992 (London: Indigo, 1996), High Fidelity, 1995 (London:
Indigo, 1996), About a Boy, 1998 (London: Indigo, 1999).
 Trollope Past and Present 13
a Boy, where Hornby confronts the paradox that sensitive boys need to shield their
feelings to survive secondary school, whereas grown men need to re-connect with
their vulnerability in order to form meaningful and lasting relationships.
Will Fielding has coasted over life for 36 years, his glorying in his laddish
behaviour covering up his lack of emotional resources and fear of intimacy. A brief
and sexually satisfying relationship with a single mother launches him on a course
of deceit, when he invents a two year old son to gain entry to the local single-parent
social group. Marcus, aged 12, is an only child brought up by his lone mother. The
closeness of their symbiotic and somewhat parasitic relationship hampers him in the
formation of normal adolescent relationships based on street-cred and superficiality.
The interlacement of Will and Marcus’s lives re-places them on the continuum of
masculine behaviour. Hornby summarises the changes in his final paragraph:

Marcus had friends, he could look after himself, he had developed a skin – the kind of skin
that Will had just shed ... Will had lost his shell, and his cool, and his distance, and he felt
scared and vulnerable, but he got to be with Rachel.74

This masculinity is a paradox: to survive in the world, men need a shield of

toughness, but they have also to learn to drop that shield to make deep and significant
relationships with women, in order to experience the fulfilment of that primal bond.
In packaging these three works with themes overtly appealing to men – football,
hi-fi and laddish good times – Hornby reveals himself as the propagandist of our
times. His appeal as a best-selling novelist declares his success in placing his thesis
before his audience and that it is a view that is widely recognised and accepted. It
epitomises the zeitgeist, the embodiment of the anti-sexist men’s movement, where
men adopt new non-oppressive, life-affirming ways of being men.
What goes around comes around. Trollope, writing in the 1860s and 1870s,
constructs a masculinity based on an almost identical premise and similarly packages
his goods to ensure an attentive male audience. There is indeed a veneer of masculinist
behaviour in the novels, of men relating to men in their workplaces, in their clubs,
in their vestries and on their estates, and this has been explored by Mark Turner in
Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain.75 However,
beneath the veneer, Trollope’s masculinity is explicitly grounded in a man being in
touch with his nurturing side. Men need to learn the language which puts feelings into
words. The pleasure of physical expression of married love will be immeasurably
deepened by a relationship founded on equality and respect. Expressing love for
one’s children and closeness to them in practical and physical ways will bring a
satisfaction that transcends the exercise of power in public and political life.
My intention is to expose these threads in his novels and his manner of doing it.
The New Man, so heralded by our generation, is alive and well in Trollope’s novels,
changing the nappies, making the gravy, pushing the pram, hugging his sons and his
daughters. Victorian men are not who we have popularly constructed them to be.

74
Hornby, About a Boy, 285–6.
75
Mark W. Turner, Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian
Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
This page intentionally left blank
 Chapter 1

The Making of Victorian Manliness

When Benjamin Spock the child-care guru died in 1997, his son John in a post-obit
interview said, ‘He was very Victorian. He’s never been a person who gave me a hug. He
wouldn’t kiss me’.1 In describing the cold detachment of his father as ‘Victorian’, he fed
into a nexus of assumptions and associations that people commonly hold about Victorian
men in general and fathers in particular. He anticipated that we would all know what he
meant. Victorian men have been commonly believed to be harsh, stern fathers, subjugating
their families by exploiting their legal, financial and often their physical powers over their
dependants. They have been viewed as emotional illiterates, domestic despots, bolstering
their phallocentric view of the world in the men-only institutions of their professions,
bastions of the privilege of their sex. Their era has been seen as the age of the stiff upper lip,
when feelings, especially sexual feelings, were kept firmly under wraps. This stiff upper lip,
so necessary to survive the daily floggings of the English Public School, has been closely
linked with the Age of Empire, when Britain ruled the world; in the face of catastrophe, a
Briton could be relied upon to cope with characteristic British phlegm and understatement.
‘Victorian’ has become an adjective of derogation; applied to sex it implies suppression
and denial; applied to morals it implies hypocrisy; apply it to religion and we perceive a
culture where what is seen is more important than the creeds that underlie it.
What has informed these beliefs? The popularity of deprecating Victorian values,
and encouraging their caricature, started soon after Victoria’s death. Lytton Strachey,
in Eminent Victorians,2 shifted the hagiography of the heroes and heroines of the era
to revelations of their feet of clay. As subsequent generations continued to distance
themselves from the era, it became increasingly acceptable to belittle the institutions
of the time, and we are only now beginning to recognise this for what it was, as
modern enquiry gets the record straighter.
There has been a good deal of focus on Victorian masculinities over the past 40
odd-years, starting with Newsome’s Godliness and Good Learning, in 1961. Newsome
constructs his Victorian masculinity by examining the shifting precepts of the education
offered in the public schools and he draws heavily on the memoirs of Archbishop
Benson and his family. Mangan and Walvin’s collection of essays, published in
1987, similarly posits a masculinity largely assimilated through schooling, while the
contributors to Hall’s Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, in 1994,
pursue some of the theological debates through contemporary fiction, particularly
Kingsley and Hughes. Vance’s seminal work, The Sinews of the Spirit, of 1985, unites
threads of education, philosophy, the new economics and theology.

1
‘Growing up the Hard Way’, BBC2, Wednesday 11 June 1997, 9.00pm. Listed in The
Guardian, 11 June, 1997, G2, 20.
2
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 1918 (London: Folio Society, 1967).
16 New Men in Trollope’s Novels

Figure 1.1 Punch Cartoon December 10 1859

Tosh has adopted a significantly different stand and in A Man’s Place: Masculinity
and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, he has reframed many of the
earlier commentators’ core material. His thesis proposes that domesticity is central
to the Victorian culture of masculinity and that this has been given scant attention
in the past because of the skewed positioning of historical commentators. He argues
that pre-feminist historical research (that is, before 1970), by confining women to
 The Making of Victorian Manliness 17
hearth and home, denied them any meaningful role in society. In identifying the
domestic as the sphere of women who exercised no power, historians overlooked it
as an area which defined so much of a man’s power. Tosh posits that it was in the
home, the seat of patriarchy, or ‘father-rule’, that men usually wielded power and
drew self-respect from their exercise of it. This masculinity defined by domesticity is
beset by contradictions. As Tosh says, the expectation that men spend non-working
hours at home assumes a companionate marriage, based on love, common values
and shared interests, but this was at variance with a belief in rigid sexual difference
and in innate female dependence and inferiority.3
Tosh, in common with other commentators like Newsome, and the contributors to
Mangan and Walvin and Hall’s anthologies, draws heavily on the archives of families
like the Bensons to furnish his theory. In all he explores seven families in some depth,
but the Benson family dominates, perhaps because of the sheer volume of memoirs
and diaries left behind by Edward Benson, the schoolmaster who became Archbishop
of Canterbury, his wife, three sons and two daughters. A.C. and E.F. Benson, two of
the sons, between them wrote ten books about their family affairs.4 Both parents kept
meticulous diaries and Edward Benson assuaged his grief when his eldest son Martin
died of meningitis, at 17, by writing an account of his son’s life and the growth of
his faith. Such a welter of fine detail about the functioning of one family can cloud
judgement of more common practice. The Bensons’ devotion to Godliness and good
learning is not necessarily an indicator of the established order of the time, in spite of
Newsome’s declaration that they give ‘a wonderfully clear picture of Victorian life’5
and Tosh’s assertion that Edward Benson’s exercise of patriarchal power, and the
dissimulation of demonstrations of love for his children, was a mid-Victorian norm.
Tosh takes care to present both sides of the argument. He assembles an impressive
array of empirical evidence of fathers involving themselves closely in the care of their
children in infancy. He balances works advocating commitment to active and involved
fatherhood, such as William Cobbett’s 1830 Advice to Young Men6 with Carlyle’s
outspoken revulsion at his friend David Irving’s close attention to his new baby:

Irving’s talk and thoughts return with a resistless biass [sic] to the same charming topic,
start from where they please. Visit him at any time, you find him dry-nursing his offspring;
speak to him, he directs your attention to the form of its nose, the manner of its waking
and sleeping, and feeding, and digesting.7

This passage, quoted in full by Norma Clarke in her closely argued essay ‘Strenuous
Idleness: Thomas Carlyle and the man of letters as Hero’ in Manful Assertions, and
abbreviated by Tosh in A Man’s Place, leads him to the view that it was Carlyle’s
standpoint that gained ground through Victoria’s reign, not the example of the Prince
Consort’s close involvement with the royal nursery. But he does make an important
point about the centrality of the hearth in understanding Victorian masculinity. The

3
Tosh, A Man’s Place, 11–27.
4
Newsome, 150.
5
Newsome, 149.
6
William Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, 1830 (London: Davies, 1926).
7
Roper and Tosh, 33, quoted in abbreviated form, Tosh, 88.
18 New Men in Trollope’s Novels
Industrial Revolution, and the creation of a manufacturing industry, had given rise to a
new middle class who earned their living with their heads in counting houses instead
of with their hands in the fields, but Tosh points out that in 1851 more of the middle
classes still lived over, or adjacent to, their work premises than went beyond the home to
work.8 For many children, fathers were an ever-present influence in their daily lives.
As Mark Girouard makes clear in The Return to Camelot, there are several other
equally powerful forces which interplay in this complex of masculinities. Girouard
focuses on the nineteenth-century slant given to traditions of chivalry and explores
how both chivalry and Christian manliness were influenced by rising socialist
ideals.9 The Return to Camelot is a compelling account that traces the European
chivalric code through its metamorphosis into an Anglo-Saxon behavioural maxim
which believed that if a man was behaving badly (such as panicking in the face
of death) he was probably an Italian, or other foreign Johnny. The Italians were a
popular target for Trollope’s wit. Miss Altiflora, whose great-grandmother was a
Fiasco, and her great-great-grandmother a Desgrazia, in Kept in the Dark,10 is typical.
The principle that the ideal knight was brave, loyal, true to his word, courteous,
generous and merciful lived on in codes of gentlemanly behaviour, particularly in
how gentlemen behaved towards women. The celebration of these ideals found
expression in what might be termed a designer style, a growing taste for medieval
styles of architecture and decoration, which starts to merge imperceptibly with the
Gothic, as the eighteenth century came to a close. Windsor castle was remodelled
on medieval lines in the 1830s and Scott’s novels, Ivanhoe especially, spread the
taste to a very wide audience. Its apogee was reached with the Eglinton Tournament,
the extravaganza of parade and jousting held in 1838, most certainly the inspiration
for the Thorne’s fête champêtre in Barchester Towers, and itself inspired by the
tournament that opens Scott’s Ivanhoe.11
Girouard stresses the importance of Kenelm Digby’s The Broad Stone of
Honour, first published in 1822, in the development of the spread of chivalric
ideas, propounding the thesis that a prosperous middle-class man cannot become
a gentleman.12 For Digby, this is where England lost her way, with the advent of
the Industrial Revolution, when men who might have lived as gentlemen turned to
commerce. The belief that it was ungentlemanly to betray an interest in money owed
much to Digby. The Broad Stone of Honour gave rise to an entire genre of Victorian
fiction writing (largely in defiance of his principles) which explored themes around
gentlemanliness and whether it came from birth, breeding, or an innate characteristic
that transcended factors of wealth, descent, or poverty. These are the explicit themes
of such novels as Dinah Craik’s Jack Halifax, Gentleman,13 Edna Lyall’s Donovan14
8
Tosh, A Man’s Place, 17.
9
Girouard, The Return to Camelot (Yale: Yale University Press, 1981) 132.
10
Kept in the Dark, 205.
11
Girouard’s chap. 7 (87–110) is a detailed account of the inspiration, preparation and
presentation of the Eglinton Tournament.
12
Kenelm Digby, The Broad Stone of Honour (London: Rivington, 1823).
13
Dinah Maria Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman, 1857 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1914).
14
Edna Lyall, Donovan, 1882 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1889).
 The Making of Victorian Manliness 19
15
and, of course, Dickens’ Great Expectations. Mrs Henry Wood’s Mrs Halliburton’s
Troubles16 and Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago17 explore similar territory, with
an explicit Christian message. It is an issue regularly addressed by Trollope, for
instance in Lady Anna, where the heiress heroine sticks to her decision to marry her
tailor–lover and in Marion Fay, which debates whether a Post Office clerk should,
per se, be barred from pressing his suit with a member of the British aristocracy. In a
nice ironic shot across the bows, he is accepted into the bosom of her family when he
discovers he is the heir to an ancient Italian title. It forms part of an implicit debate
on so many of Trollope’s plots: is Mary Thorne gentle-born, through her father’s
kinship with the Thornes at Ullathorne, or base-born because of the circumstances
of her birth? Her uncle says ‘I wish … that her birth were equal to her fortune, as
her worth is superior to both’,18 valuing her character above blood and money. The
Crawleys, on the other hand, remain genteel in spite of their poverty by virtue of their
ancestry so graphically clear in Grace’s face, full of ‘the other beauty, which shows
itself in fine lines, and a noble spirit, – the beauty which comes from breeding’.19
Archdeacon Grantly frames this specifically in chivalric terms when he says to Mr
Crawley ‘We stand on the only perfect level on which such men can meet each other.
We are both gentlemen’,20 a status denied to Mr Prong in Rachel Ray, who was
‘deficient in one vital qualification for clergyman of the Church of England; he was
not a gentleman’.21 This seems a clear if intuitive grasp of the concept. Plantagenet
Palliser is more equivocal. When he says to Frank Tregear ‘I never yet gave the lie
to a gentleman’,22 he implies this is a concept he is both familiar and comfortable
with. However, when Mary defends her choice of suitor saying he is a gentleman,
Palliser’s retort suggests a more plastic view. ‘So is my private secretary. There is not
a clerk in one of our public offices who does not consider himself to be a gentleman
… The word is too vague to carry with it any meaning that ought to be serviceable to
you in thinking of such a matter’.23 His remarks reflect the fluidity of the age, when
a man such as Edward Benson, the son of a bankrupt chemical manufacturer whose
death left the family destitute, could rise to become Archbishop of Canterbury.24
Through The Broad Stone of Honour too, the threads of influences on the composite
of Victorian manliness begin to merge, since Digby was at Cambridge with Tennyson,
whose influence on the Victorian interpretation of chivalric codes was spread wide

15
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1861 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911).
16
Mrs Henry Wood, Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles, 1862 (London: Richard Bentley and
Son, 1897).
17
Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago, 1857 (London: Macmillan, 1891).
18
Doctor Thorne, 603.
19
Last Chronicle, 613.
20
Last Chronicle, 885.
21
Rachel, 77.
22
Duke’s Children, 39.
23
Duke’s Children, 67.
24
Such social mobility is the explicit theme of Samuel Smiles’s Self Help, 1859 (London:
IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1996).
20 New Men in Trollope’s Novels
into middle-class culture with The Idylls of the King.25 Forty thousand copies of the
first series were sold within weeks of its publication. Tennyson’s poems gave birth to
a generation of little boys called Arthur, predestined to carry the standard of honesty,
valour and integrity through to a noble and worthy death. However, the men in the
poems, far from having the deeds of glory as their main story line, are wracked with
misgiving about women, full of anxieties about their honour and their chastity (in
the sense of chaste to their marriage vows). It is certainly an interesting contribution
to the manhood debate, where Tennyson’s medievalism is his back-drop, a popular
style statement to his real subject, an exploration of uncertain masculinities. Digby
was also at Cambridge with Arthur Hallam, whose standards in his short life inspired
so many who met him to celebrate his life in literary testimonial, and with F.D.
Maurice, commonly acknowledged by commentators to be formative in the thinking
of those who later articulated ideas of Christian manliness.
Victorian masculinity was also shaped by the articulation of the ‘hard’ discourses
of political economy that emerged to describe the changes in society brought about
by the Industrial Revolution. The rapid shift from a rural to a manufacturing economy
changed the way the national economy worked and former models of economic
theory proved inadequate to describe these changes. A generation of economic
commentators was born, who had to find a new vocabulary with which to describe
the transformation. In order to describe the implications of the new economy, these
commentators of the developing industrial economy formulated their views in
a debate that turned away from addressing the individual and focused on a wider
macrocosmic field of study. Their writings promoted a great surge of interest in
economic theory, evidenced by the popularity of articles on such topics in the weightier
periodicals. The vocabulary used to frame these writings, devoid of sentiment, and
with little moral conceptualisation, can be experienced as masculinist, but it did not,
per se, exclude women. Harriet Martineau wrote an extremely successful collection
of what she called ‘fables’ to present these ‘hard’ texts in a form that was accessible
and understandable to a wider audience unschooled in economic theory.26 While
economists like David Ricardo published their papers in weighty journals, such as
The Westminster Review, interpretations of their ideas found a ready audience in
family-targeted journals, such as The Cornhill, which regularly carried articles on
economics and science alongside softer material. The major players in these new
disciplines took their lead from Adam Smith, whose An Enquiry into the Nature
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations had been published in 1776.27 Ricardo assumed
Smith’s reins when he wrote The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in

25
Alfred Tennyson, The Idylls of the King, 1842–1885 (London: Penguin Books,
1996).
26
These were published between 1832–1834, with titles such as ‘Berkley the Banker,
or Banknotes and Bullion: a tale for the times’, ‘Dawn Island’ (about the Corn Laws), and
‘French Wines and politics: a tale of the French Revolution’. They were published collectively
as Illustrations of Political Economy, 2 vols (London: C. Fox, 1832–1834).
27
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776
(London: Penguin Books, 1974).
 The Making of Victorian Manliness 21
28
1817. This work explores the relationship between cash, capital and commerce,
a nexus we now know as capitalism, and he was the first to formulate the theories
that link money supply and the management of a national economy. Such thinking
particularly challenged politicians in their views about the role of the State in a
nation’s prosperity and play a large part in the way Trollope frames Plantagenet
Palliser’s political creed. From his earliest youth, Palliser’s greatest ambition had
been to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, a position he had to relinquish on inheriting
the Dukedom from his uncle. At the end of The Duke’s Children, he says:

If I could have my way, – which is of course impossible, for I cannot put off my
honours, – I would return to my old place. I would return to the Exchequer where the work
is hard and certain, where a man can do, or at any rate attempt to do, some special thing.
A man there, if he sticks to that and does not need to travel beyond it, need not be popular,
need not be partisan, need not be eloquent, need not be a courtier. He should understand
his profession, as should a lawyer, or a doctor.29

Let the Chancellor of the Exchequer be an economist, he is saying, not a politician.

In the same book, the body of knowledge of economic theory that Plantagenet
learned from his serious and structured reading as a young man (as demonstrated in
The Small House at Allington), regularly reveals itself in his lectures to his wayward
sons. When Gerald loses £3,400 at cards, he (Palliser) demands, ‘Do you ever think
what money is?’. After some considerable hesitation, Gerald replies, ‘Cheques,
and sovereigns, and bank-notes’, before his father embarks on a measured account
of the relationship between money, labour and the accumulation of wealth. In
a nice self-referential broadside at Gerald’s lack of direction in life, Trollope has
Palliser hankering after a son like Lord Buttercup, ‘only a few months older than
Silverbridge, who was already a junior lord, … [and who] had already written an
article in The Fortnightly on the subject of Turkish finance’.30 The Fortnightly, an
enterprise of high endeavour, financed by Trollope and friends like Frederic and
Edward Chapman, Frederic Harrison, and E.S. Beesly, with George Lewes as editor,
was launched on 1st May 1865 and while it always carried a novel (starting with The
Belton Estate), its avowed aim was to be a forum for views on politics, literature,
philosophy, science and art.31 The lead article in the first issue was the first instalment
of Walter Bagehot’s ‘The English Constitution’.
Jeremy Bentham was another of the major formulators of theoretical politics and
economics. His principles of utilitarianism, first expounded in Fragment on Government
of 177632 and expanded and developed through his career, strove to link the motivation
of enlightened self interest as a means to achieving the common good with an exact
quantification of pain and pleasure. His wish to give his moral philosophy the credibility

28
David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817 (London:
Dent, 1973).
29
Duke’s Children, 622–3.
30
Duke’s Children, 519.
31
For an account of the establishment of The Fortnightly, see Autobiography, 189–94.
32
Jeremy Bentham, A Comment on the Commentaries; and, A Fragment on Government,
eds J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (London: Athlone Press, 1977).
22 New Men in Trollope’s Novels
of scientific proof makes him one of the chief proponents of the masculinist voice of his
age, and Plantagenet Palliser, in expounding his own Whig philosophy to Silverbridge
in The Duke’s Children gives his son a clear lesson in Benthamite philosophy: ‘Then
the Duke gave his son a somewhat lengthy political lecture, which was intended to
teach him that the greatest benefit of the greatest number was the object to which all
political studies should tend.’33 Such examples show Trollope aware of, and interacting
with, these hard-edged disciplines. Thomas Malthus, the father of modern demography,
infiltrates Trollope’s texts to an even greater degree:

‘No, I won’t be plucked. Baker was plucked last year ... he got among a set of men who
did nothing but smoke and drink beer. Malthusians we call them.’
‘Malthusians?’
‘“Malt” you know, aunt, and “use”, meaning that they drink beer.’34

Thus does Frank Gresham twit Lady de Courcy with an undergraduate humour that
has changed little over the years, twisting contemporary academic debate into a joke
she cannot understand. The joke works on several levels and has perhaps even gained
the odd one over the past 140 years. It implies an awareness in the masculinist milieu
that there was an on-going debate about Malthus and demography. It is a joke about
class, about the working man with his tobacco and beer and his position in the market
place and the parallels for Frank in the market place of marriage. It may very possibly,
for Trollope, have held reverberations of the debate about birth control,35 as it does
for us, since Malthusian theory was, and is, often spuriously connected with the
advocacy of the prevention of conception and Trollope regularly advises his heroines
to marry, have two children and live happily ever after.36 Malthus felt travestied by
such interpretation of his views, as is clear from this extract from his essay:

I should always particularly reprobate any artificial or unnatural modes of checking

population, both on account of their immorality and their tendency to remove a necessary
stimulus to industry. If it were possible for each married couple to limit by a wish the

33
Duke’s Children, 57.
34
Dr Thorne, 72. Skilton glosses this as ‘Followers of T.R. Malthus (1766–1834) who
proposes that population naturally tended to increase faster than food-production; hence
advocates of family planning’, 626.
35
Exactly when Malthusian thinking became synonymous with the birth control
movement is a moot point. Yves Charbit, ‘The Fate of Malthus’s Work: History and Ideology’,
Malthus Past and Present, eds J. Dupâquier, A. Fauve-Chamonix and E. Grebenik (London:
Academic Press, 1983) 17–30, suggests that it started as early as 1820, advanced by the
proselytising of Francis Place, though the movement that he began only became known as
‘neo-malthusianism’ many years after Place’s death. Petersen, in Malthus (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard UP, 1979), points to Place’s own work, Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle
of Population, published in1822. The linkage is certainly well-forged by the foundation of
the Malthusian League in 1877, the year of the trial of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant
for the publication of Charles Knowlton’s The Fruits of Philosophy, the 1832 pamphlet on
contraceptive techniques.
36
For instance, Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 110, and Framley Parsonage, chapter 48,
‘How they were all married, had two children, and lived happy ever after.’
 The Making of Victorian Manliness 23
number of their children, there is certainly reason to fear that the indolence of the human
race would be very greatly increased, and that neither the population of individual
countries nor of the whole earth would ever reach its natural and proper extent.37

It is heavily ironic that Malthusianism grew to become synonymous with the birth
control movement (particularly in the syllogism ‘neo-Malthusianism’), a point made
by William Petersen, whose seminal work on Malthus was translated into French
under the title Malthus, le Premier Antimalthusien.38 It adds to the confusion that
after Malthus published his first Essay on Population in 1798, his subsequent Essays,
as they were published, were titled as subsequent editions, instead of free-standing
works that pursue the development of his thought. Later ‘editions’ of his Essay are
so at variance with the first, for instance as he expanded and shifted his view on Poor
Law reform, that they might be considered entirely different works.
Malthus’ shifting views on the operation of out-relief for the poor, the
Speenhamland system, are contradictory and have been described as the opposition
between Population Malthus and Pastor Malthus.39 His view expressed in the Essay
of 1798 is that the positive checks of disease, poverty, famine and war, as opposed
to the preventive checks of postponed marriage, moral restraint and vice (which
includes the use of contraception), were the ‘natural’ constraints on the labouring
population. At times he can also be detected advancing a view that the operation of
out-relief within the Poor Law militates against these ‘natural’ positive checks. He
argues that if the augmentation of family size guarantees a labourer additional relief,
the labourer has no incentive to adopt the preventive checks of postponed marriage
and moral restraint and the land owner has no incentive to pay his married labourer
a sufficient wage. The hardest line he takes, disavowed in later ‘Editions’, is that
entitlement to out-relief related to family size should cease after a period of due
notice. This view was regularly and enthusiastically taken up by rate-payers (and
Malthus’ own Poor rates were particularly high40) and it does form the foundation of
the thinking behind the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, which gave rise to the work-
house system, pilloried by Dickens in Oliver Twist. Modern analysis of family size
set against income and dependence on parish relief, before and after the 1834 Act,
using modern demographic resources and techniques refutes these assumptions.41
From such views it might be thought that the situation of the labouring poor
in Ireland might have been viewed as a working experiment into the effects of the
positive checks of famine and poverty. However, it is clear that Malthus’ views on
the Irish problem were informed by compassion, a desire for social equality and a
modicum of anti-imperialist instinct: ‘Let the Irish Catholics have all that they have

37
Petersen, 192 and Dupâquier, preface, ix.
38
Dupâquier, preface, viii.
39
M.W. Flinn, ‘Malthus and his time’, Dupâquier, 92, enlarged on by Anne Digby,
‘Malthus and the Reform of the Poor Law’, Dupâquier, 97–109.
40
B. Stapleton, ‘The Local Evidence and the Principle of Population’, Dupâquier, 54–5.
41
Flinn, 91; Petersen (121) examines the same data, but considers the results less
conclusive.
24 New Men in Trollope’s Novels
demanded, for they have asked nothing but what justice and good policy should
concede to them.’42
Trollope’s personal quandary posed by the problems of the Irish famines,
graphically laid out in Castle Richmond, is remarkably similar. He felt that the
bottom line should be that no able-bodied person should be able to claim relief from
the rates, so as to set them on a par with a working labourer. This is the thesis of the
road-building exercise in Castle Richmond.43 On the other hand, the pursuit of such
principles was causing suffering and death to women and children. In the end, says
Trollope, of course the money to feed them had to be found.44 In The Fixed Period,
his exploration, from a utilitarian viewpoint, of a future society where universal
euthanasia at 67 is advocated, connects even more strongly with Malthus.
Malthus’ work established him as the father of modern demography and
the instigator of properly conducted censuses. His researches in the 1790s on
the population of England were of necessity empirical and led directly to the
establishment of a formal and official system of censuses. While Malthus was not the
first to comment on demographic issues, it was his work that sparked a widespread
interest in demography, which underpinned the acceptance of the need for a census,
the emerging skill of census-taking and the interpretation of the results.
It was John Rickman who conducted the first census in 1801, and under his
aegis, each successive census became a little more accurate. The greatest step
forward in consistent methodology came in 1837, in the setting up of the office of
Registrar General and the appointment of T.H. Lister45 to the post. That there was
a Committee of the Statistical Society of London46 to advise him says much about
the amount of current professional and amateur interest in demography. Lister’s
primary responsibility was to establish a comprehensive and compulsory system for
the registration of Births, Marriages and Deaths.
Lister’s census in 1841 produced ages, occupations and birthplaces of the
population, and their totals, and marked the transition to ‘modern’ censuses. The
next, in 1851, enabled the publication of population tables which included ages, civil
condition, occupation, birthplaces and infirmities; separate censuses of religious
attendance and education were held, for the one and only time, in this year. There is
plenty of evidence that Trollope had a direct interest in censuses, and the demographic
information in these reports is a fascinating yardstick by which to measure the
society that Trollope creates in his novels. In The American Senator, he says, ‘At
every interval of ten years, when the census is taken, the population of Dillsborough
is always found to have fallen off in some slight degree’.47 For Dillsborough the
census is the signifier of the air of proletarian decay which pervades the place, the
proof that the good old days when ‘The Bush’ was an important posting inn have
passed, and have not been replaced by a new prosperity built on industrial resources.

42
Petersen, 109.
43
Castle Richmond, 201.
44
Castle Richmond, 346.
45
Richard Lawton, ed. The Census and Social Structure (London: Frank Cass, 1978) 16.
46
Lawton, 16.
47
American Senator, 12.
 The Making of Victorian Manliness 25
In The Vicar of Bullhampton Frank Fenwick studiously seeks a topic of conversation
away from the pain of Harry Gilmore’s broken heart: ‘He talked of church services,
of ritual, of the quietness of a Sunday in London, and of the Sunday occupations of
three millions of people, not a fourth of whom attend divine service’.48 Frank knows
the population of London, and is clearly au fait with the report of the 1851 Church
census, and the ensuing debate. The results of the religious census, tabulated by
Horace Mann, and published in 1854, demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief,
more than half the population did not go to church on a Sunday.49 Mann’s chart is
clearly the factual origin of Frank Fenwick’s observation while in London that less
than a quarter of that great city are ‘constant in their divine worship’, as Mrs Prime,
in Rachel Ray, so plaintively puts it.50
The religious census of 1851, and the publication of the close scrutiny of the
returns in 1854, prompted a wide debate which dragged on interminably and
was clearly still going strong in 1869 when Trollope was writing The Vicar of
Bullhampton. An examination of some of his novels reveals that while perhaps,
overall rather more than one in four of his characters can be found on their knees on
a Sunday, a significant number declare that other things have a greater appeal. This
becomes an issue explicitly concerning men and masculine discourse in novels like
Framley Parsonage, where politicians like Nathaniel Sowerby and Howard Smith
wish to align their causes to Christian observance. They engage Bishop Proudie to
support their Saturday evening lectures and to find the theme of his Sunday sermon in
their secular projects, the gap between their profane practice and the church service
offering great opportunity for irony and humour.51
In Clergymen of the Church of England Trollope’s nostalgic yearning for an
illusory past coupled with a mordant view of the contemporary cloth’s preoccupation
with temporalities suggest him to be a sentimental cynic. By contrast, in his novels
he is primarily occupied with the social reverberations within the Church of England
and his great set pieces in the Barchester Chronicles explore the clashes between
the old high-and-dries, the new Puseyites and the rising tide of the evangelical
movement. Outside his clerical creations is a fine array of men who do not go to
church, old pagans52 like Daniel Caldigate, Mr Scarborough and the old Duke of
Omnium, godless rogues like the Marquis of Brotherton and Sir Hugh Clavering and

48
Bullhampton, 493.
49
David. M. Thompson, ‘The Religious census of 1851’, Lawton, 241–85. The statistics
drawn from the Religious Census of 1851 have promoted controversy ever since they were
published in 1854, largely because the census was designed to assess the provision of
accommodation, rather than a headcount of how many people went to church on one Sunday
in March 1851. For this reason, there has been a constant reinterpreting of the figures for
morning, afternoon and evening services, producing widely divergent projections of how
many people regularly went to church. David Thompson’s chapter in The Census and Social
Structure explores this graphically and coherently.
50
Rachel, 389.
51
Framley, chapters 2–8.
52
Both Daniel Caldigate and the old Duke of Omnium are referred to in the text as ‘old
pagans’, though since the term is applied to the Duke before he takes communion shortly
before his death, and Daniel Caldigate is heard to murmur ‘God bless you my son’, as John
26 New Men in Trollope’s Novels
non-believers and free thinkers like Daniel Brattle and Hugh Stanbury. It is worth
noting that even the most godless turn to the church for christenings, weddings and
funerals. No child goes unbaptised, and even Mr Scarborough in Mr Scarborough’s
Family needs the support of clerical documentation to pull off his marriage scam.
The American Senator, an ironic appraisal of the paradoxes of British institutions
from an outsider’s point of view, is particularly explicit about who does and who does
not go to church. Reginald Morton, the hero, seldom goes to church.53 Mr Runciman
refuses to go because of the Reverend Mainwaring’s sharp practice over some fields
he rented.54 Mrs Morton declines to go to church a second time during her stay in
Bragton because there was no fire in her pew.55 Of Arabella and Lady Trefoil we
hear, ‘Of course they did not go to church’.56 Mr Gotobed laughs at the invitation to
go to church again on his second Sunday57 and Lord Rufford hates being anywhere
on a Sunday but travelling by train between meets.58 On the other side of the balance
are John Morton, who goes whatever the weather, and Lady Ushant, who goes to two
services each Sunday, certainly accompanied by Mary Masters when Mary is her
guest.59 Since Mary is suspected of carrying a torch for the curate, one could safely
put her down as a regular attender, and the expectation at Mistletoe, the family seat
of the Duke of Mayfair, is that guests would go to church. Lord Rufford, true to
form, declines church while at Mistletoe; while Arabella is criticised for ducking out
of the afternoon service (for ‘ladies are supposed to require more church than men’60)
no opprobrium sticks to him: ‘[The Duchess of Mayfair] would not have thought of
repudiating such a suitor as Lord Rufford because he did not go to church.’61 The
American Senator is a fine exposé of hypocritical and materialistic values and in a
novel where church-going is a major signifier, Trollope accurately reflects a society
where three quarters find other things to do on a Sunday.62
That young men particularly are prone not to go to church is regularly commented
upon. ‘As for the girls, they go as a matter of course, but young men are allowed
so much of their own way’, says Mrs Ray.63 Mrs Roper, Johnny Eames’ landlady,
shows more knowledge of the ways of the world when she dodges Mrs Eames’
bid for support in seeing that young Johnny keeps up his church attendance: ‘“I
don’t suppose I can look after that, ma’am”, Mrs Roper answered, conscientiously.
“Young gentlemen choose mostly their own churches”’.64 And with heart-warming

leaves for Australia, he is perhaps referring to their non-attendance rather than a literal
adherence to an earlier creed.
53
American Senator, 31.
54
American Senator, 30.
55
American Senator, 77.
56
American Senator, 132.
57
American Senator, 133.
58
American Senator, 24.
59
American Senator, 204.
60
American Senator, 253.
61
American Senator, 254.
62
Lawton, 259.
63
Rachel, 389.
64
Small House, 40.
 The Making of Victorian Manliness 27
bluntness, Oswald Standish tells Robert Kennedy, ‘That’s the sort of thing I never
do’, when invited to go to church at Loughlinter.65
Fewer people went to church in the large towns than in the country. Contemporary
opinion laid this down to the concentrations of urban working poor in new towns ill-
served by churches and the Baptists in particular made a good deal of noise about the
need for urban missions.66 While Trollope rarely deals with the urban working classes
at issue here, not going to church is a common occurrence in his London society.
Trollope’s view, from the patterns of attendance in the novels, is that a more likely
reason is that there are more entertaining alternatives in the larger towns. In Phineas
Finn, a trip to the zoo is a popular attraction and even Robert Kennedy, the Calvinist
whose dour Scottish Sabbaths give Lady Laura a headache, is found amusing
himself there one Sunday afternoon before his marriage.67 In The Duke’s Children,
Plantagenet Palliser, while implying a criticism of his son for his backsliding, is
actually not intending to go himself,68 like 77 per cent of the population of London.
The articulation of the new economic theories so widely disseminated, offered a
legitimacy to the new moneyed class, who found social mobility through their wealth,
a generation of immensely rich factory owners, merchants, bankers, who had risen
from humble beginnings. The very success of these entrepreneurs led to a growing
anxiety about the morality of the market-place. How could a man keep his integrity
and succeed in business? Was it, indeed, possible to combine integrity and financial
success? That ambition and self-betterment could be honourable in themselves is the
thesis of the immensely popular Self-Help, by Samuel Smiles, which sold 20,000
copies in 1859, its first year of publication, and which offered modern-day parables
of industry and ambition succeeding when moderated by integrity. He recommends
the study of the lives of the great and the good. His book is a collection of potted
biographies of great men, many from his generation, interspersed with homilies on
the virtues of honest and hard work. His precepts are the antithesis of accepting one’s
estate, a theory of social structure pressed with more enthusiasm by the aristocracy
on the working classes than embraced by the lower orders themselves. Sir Richard
Arkwright was the son of a barber, Dr David Livingstone the son of a weaver, Sir
Cloudesley Shovel (‘a great admiral’) the son of a cobbler.69 This was a topic dear to
Trollope’s heart. Is He Popenjoy? is a close examination of whether Dean Lovelace
can ever quite shake off his humble origins as the son of a livery stabler, but also of
whether it is any poor reflection on him that he can still demonstrate the robust health
of his ancestors, since there is a parallel debate which strongly argues that the effete
peerage needs the re-invigoration of good yeoman blood.
It is impossible to overestimate the contribution of Thomas Carlyle to all aspects
of this debate, from the specifics of Samuel Smiles’ works, to the wider polemic
brought by the social changes of the Industrial Revolution. Carlyle, born in 1795,
grew up through this era of social change; indeed, his own family history epitomises

65
Phineas Finn, 387.
66
Lawton, 245.
67
Phineas Finn, 45.
68
Duke’s Children, 236.
69
Smiles, 5.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
dezer namen. Van sommige vleinamen zijn verkleinnamen afgeleid
in alle of schier alle boven vermelde verkleinvormen. Van den
vleinaam H a y o , bij voorbeeld, zijn afgeleid de verkleinnamen
H a e i s e , H a e i t e , H a e i t s e , H a e i k e en H a e i t s j e (in
Nederlandsche spelling H a a i s e , enz.); van B o a y e (B o y e )
komen B o a i t e , B o a i t s e , B o a i k e , B o a i t s j e (volgens
Nederlandsche spelwijze B o i t e , enz.); van J e l l e zijn afgeleid
J e l s e , J e l t e , J e l t s e , J e l k e , J e l t s j e , enz.

Nog een andere naamsvorm is van de vleinamen afgeleid; te weten:

de patronymicale vorm op ing eindigende. Deze vorm, het echte, het
ware Oud-Germaansche patronymicum aanduidende, kan dus van
oorsprongswegen geene eigenlijke mansvóórnamen in ’t leven
roepen; hij duidt veeleer een maagschapsnaam aan, en is dan ook,
als inga, ink of ing, veelvuldig bij de Friesche, de Sassische en de
Frankische volksstammen, die gezamenlijk het Nederlandsche volk
uitmaken, als uitgang van maagschaps- of geslachtsnamen in
gebruik. Niettemin, sommigen van deze patronymicale, op ing
eindigende namen zijn heden ten dage, als bij misverstand (’t welk in
dezen zin ook bij andere Germaansche volken voorkomt), nog bij de
Friezen als mansvóórnamen in volle geijkt gebruik. Als zoodanigen
mogen hier vermeld worden: A l i n g , A m e l i n g , A s i n g en
A s i n g a , B a l i n g , B a l l i n g , B o a y i n g (B o o y i n g ),
Ebbing, Eling, Haring, Hemsing, Henning,
N a n n i n g , Ts j a l l i n g (T j a l l i n g ), W a l i n g en nog enkele
anderen. [217]

De hedendaagsche Friezen hebben de gewoonte hunner

voorouders om de mans- en vrouwenvóórnamen te verminken en te
vervormen door vleivormen en verkleiningsvormen (overigens
geenszins eene navolgenswaardige gewoonte), getrouwelijk
aangehouden. Zij breiden dit gebruik zelfs nog meer uit. Niet enkel
dat zij die verkorte en verknoeide namen hunner voorvaders trouw in
gebruik houden, als of die wannamen heel wat eigens en bijzonders
waren, maar zij blijven ook nog steeds voortgaan met dit verknoeien
hunner namen in vlei- en verkleinvormen. Vele reeds zeer verkorte
en verdraaide namen, vooral vrouwennamen, mishandelen zij rustig
verder, zoo dat die namen ten langen leste gansch onkenbaar
worden. Van de volledige namen C a t h a r i n a en M a r g a r e t h a ,
beiden van Griekschen oorsprong en beiden van schoone
beteekenis (te weten: „de reine” en „de perel”), was bij de Friezen in
den loop der eeuwen reeds T r y n t s j e en G r y t s j e (T r ij n t j e en
G r i e t j e ) geworden. Maar het schijnt als of voor de
hedendaagsche Friezen die namen nog niet genoeg verkort en
verbasterd waren. Immers maken zij in het dagelijksche leven de
wannamen T i n e of T y n k e en N i n e of N y n k e van T r y n t s j e
of C a t h a r i n a , en K i k e van G r y t s j e of M a r g a r e t h a . Even
zoo verknoeit men D i r k of D u r k (voluit D i e d e r i k ) wel tot
D u y e , de vrouwennamen D i r k j e (beter D i e d e r i k a ) tot
D u k k e , S i b b e l t s j e tot P i b b e , J e l l e wel tot J e y e ,
J e l t s j e tot J e i of J e i k e , A e l t s j e (A a l t j e ) en B a u k j e tot
A e y e en B a e y e , A u k j e en B a r t e l t s j e tot A k k e en
B a k k e , H y l k j e en H i l t s j e tot H i k e en H i k k e , E e l k j e tot
E k e ; Ts j e a r d t s j e (T j e e r d t j e ) tot K e k k e , L u t s k e tot
L u k k e of L o k k e , J i t s k e tot J i k k e , R o m k j e tot P o m m e ,
F r o u k j e tot P o i , (S j o e r d t s j e ) tot S j u t t e , enz., enz. Deze
nieuwerwetsche en leelijke naamsmisvormingen van den laatsten
tijd worden thans in den regel niet meer in de schrijftaal opgenomen,
ofschoon A k k e , B a e y e (B a a y e ) en J e i k e ook al een enkele
maal in de boeken van den burgerlijken stand vermeld staan.
Intusschen—ware ’t honderd of twee-honderd jaren vroeger
opgekomen om R o m k j e te mismaken tot P o m m e en
S i b b e l t s j e tot P i b b e , licht hadden wij thans ook Friezinnen die
als P o m m e en P i b b e in het kerkelijke doopregister en bij den
burgerlijken stand te boek stonden. En [218]de geleerden, die
honderd jaren na ons zullen leven, zouden zich dan mogen
inspannen zoo veel ze wilden en navorschen wat ze wilden, de
oorsprong en de beteekenis van de namen P o m m e en P i b b e en
P o i , dan zekerlijk als zeer eigenaardig Friesch vermeld, zoude hun
een raadsel moeten blijven.

Nemen wij als een enkel voorbeeld om aan te toonen hoe zeer de
oude, volledige namen heden ten dage in Friesland verbasterd zijn,
den naam E k e in behandeling. E k e , zoo heeten eenige mij
bekende Friezinnen, althans zoo worden zij in het dagelijksche leven
genoemd. Eene enkele staat ook werkelijk in de kerk en ten
gemeentehuize als E k e geboekt. In den regel echter, die E k e
genoemd worden, staan als E e l k j e te boek. E k e ! korter kan het
niet! Want dat ke is slechts een aanhangsel dat den verkleinvorm
maakt; lam of laem, bij voorbeeld, wordt lamke, lammetje, in het
Friesch. Neemt men dat aangehangene ke weg, dan blijft er van den
naam E k e anders niet over als eene enkele E. Is dat nu een naam,
een eigene Friesche naam? Wel neen! E k e is een vleivorm, een
poppenamme van E e l k j e , dat weet men nog. En de naam
E e l k j e is op zijn beurt weêr een verkleinvorm, door achtervoeging
van het aanhangsel je, van den mansnaam E e l k e . Zoo maakt
men, door ze den verkleinvorm te geven, vrouwennamen van
mansnamen: P y t t s j e , (P i e t j e ) van P i e t (P i e t e r , P e t r u s ),
B a u k j e van B a u k e (B a v o ), enz. Met E e l k e zijn wij
intusschen nog lang niet waar wij wezen moeten. Immers de
mansnaam E e l k e is op zich zelven ook weêr een verkleinvorm,
door achtervoeging van ke gemaakt. De Friezen toch, hierin
onderscheiden van andere Germaansche volken, die slechts hunnen
knapen, zoo lang ze nog kleine kinderkens zijn, met verkleinnamen
noemen—de Friezen hielden en houden die namen in
verkleinvormen ook in gebruik als de kinderen tot knapen en
jongelingen, zelfs tot mannen zijn opgegroeid. Nevens E e l k e staat
E e l t j e , het eerste met den Frieschen, het laatste met den
Hollandschen verkleinvorm; beide mansnamen beteekenen het
zelfde, beiden zijn het verkleiningsvormen van E l e . In der daad
worden zij, die E e l k e of E e l t j e heeten, in den dagelijkschen
omgang dan ook wel E l e , genoemd. Maar met E l e zijn wij [219]ook
nog niet tot den oorspronkelijken vorm des naams gekomen. Ook
E l e is weêr een verkorte, een versletene vorm. E l e staat in de
plaats van E d e l e , en is door zeer gewone uitslijting van de d (de)
ontstaan. Ook in het Hollandsch zegt men wel eêl voor edel,
vereêlen voor veredelen, vooral in dichterlijken stijl. E d e l e is de
volle vorm van dezen naam, die onder ons nog in zoo menigen
verschillenden verklein- en vleivorm voorkomt. E d e l e is een naam
die eene beteekenis heeft, die eenen zin te kennen geeft. Immers de
naam E d e l of E d e l e beteekent in der daad de edele, de edele
man. E d e l of E d e l e is de nieuwere vorm van den Oud-Frieschen
mansnaam A t h a l , dat is A d e l . Zoo heette, volgens de
overlevering, de tweede Prins van Friesland, de zoon van den
eersten, van F r i s o , en hij leefde 245 jaren voor Christus’ geboorte.
En A t h a l of A d e l , dien naam hebben vele oude Friezen
gedragen. Ook is de naam van het roemruchtige Oud-Friesche
geslacht A d e l e n er van afgeleid, en niets als een patronymikum
van A d e l . 6 De vrouwelijke vorm van A t h a l of A d e l is A t h a l a
of A d e l a , en dezen naam hebben zekerlijk vele Friezinnen in den
ouden tijd gedragen. Welke vader gaf niet gaarne zulken schoonen
naam, schoon in beteekenis en schoon in klank, aan zijn dochterke?
Ook was deze naam niet alleen bij de Friezen, maar bij alle Oud-
Germaansche volken in gebruik. Ook bij de oude Franken, die
gedeeltelijk de Germaansche voorouders der hedendaags geheel
verwaalschte Franschen geweest zijn. De naam A d e l a der
Frankische vrouwen is nog als Adèle bij de hedendaagsche
Fransche dames in gebruik. Andere volken, niet het minst ook de
Hollanders, hebben ook hier in, als in zoo menige andere zaak, de
Franschen nagevolgd, en zoo is nu Adèle vrij wel een
kosmopolitische naam geworden.

De Friezen echter, trouw gehecht aan hunnen Germaanschen

volksaard, hebben zich steeds te edel geacht om zulke en
[220]andere Fransche en verfranschte namen en naamsvormen te
dragen. Zij hebben ze steeds, met betamelijke minachting, van zich
gewezen. Maar zoo er nu eene Friezin is, wier verknoeide naam
E k e haar verdriet, of zoo er eene Friesche moeder of grootmoeder
is, die er iets op tegen heeft dat haar kind of kleinkind E e l k e of
E e l t j e zal heeten zoo het een knaap is, of E e l k j e als het een
meiske is—wel nu—met die, en met honderden andere soortgelijke
verkorte en verknoeide namen staat of valt haar Friesdom niet. Dat
men dan de volle, onverbasterde, oude en schoone namen A d e l
en A d e l a , vol beteekenis, weêr in gebruik neme en in eere
herstelle! Bij dien vrouwennaam hoede men zich echter wel dat men
er geen Fransche Adèle van make! Men late, bij ’t uitspreken, den
klemtoon of de stemsate rusten op de eerste en op de derde
lettergreep, op A en a. Zoo draagt men eenen echten Frieschen
naam, in volledigen, schoonen vorm.

Bij ’t verknoeien en verbasteren van de oude, oorspronkelijke

Friesche mans- en vrouwennamen spelen de verkleinvormen eene
zeer groote rol. Wij hebben boven reeds gezien dat de namen
E e l k e en E e l t j e , E e l k j e en E k e alle vier verkleinvormen
vertoonen door de aanhangsels ke, tje, en je, en deze vormen
vinden wij terug in een zeer groot aantal hedendaagsche namen,
zoo wel van mannen als van vrouwen. Bij voorbeeld in A u k e en
B a u k e , in E p k e , H a r k e en Y k e , in W i l k e en U u l k e
(U i l k e ), in F o l k e en Ts j e p k e (T j e p k e ), in S i p k e en
W o p k e ; dan in H a e n t s j e (H a a n t j e ) en H a n t s j e , in
J e n t s j e en Y n t s j e , in L u u t s j e , R i n t s j e en W i l t s j e ,
(H a n t j e , enz.) allen mansnamen. En in A u k j e en B a u k j e ,
Y m k j e en S j o u k j e , F r o u k j e en H o u k j e , F e i k j e ,
F o e k j e en F o k j e , H i s k j e en L i s k j e , H y l k j e en
L i e u w k j e , L o l k j e en N a m k j e met O f k e en O e d s k e ,
M a e i k e en M i n k e , R i e m k e en R i n s k e , S y t s k e en
W y t s k e , S a e p k e (S a a p k e ) en S w o b k j e , Te a t s k e en
Y f k e , allen vrouwennamen. Deze en soortgelijke namen erkent
nog iedereen als verkleinvormen, omdat de aanhangsels ke, tje en je
nog heden zoowel in de schrijf- als in de spreektaal in volle gebruik
zijn. Anders is het met de Friesche namen die uitgaan op
verkleinende aanhangsels welke in de hedendaagsche spreek- en
[221]schrijftaal niet meer voorkomen. Slechts de man die de Oud-
Friesche taalkunde in het bijzonder heeft beoefend, verstaat dat er
verkleinvormen schuilen in de namen A t s e en W a t s e , S y t s e
en W y t s e , R e i t s e , W e i t s e en S w e i t s e , D o a i t s e en
H o a i t s e , H o a t s e en H a i t s e , F e t s e en J e t s e , T j i t s e
en R i t s e , in R i e n t s , B i e n t s en G r a e t s , in U u l t s e n en
L u u t s e n , in Y t s e n en M o n t s e n , in D o u w t s e n , J e l t s e n
en M a r t s e n ; verder in A b e l e en H e a b e l e , A n d e l e en
B a r t e l e , E a b e l e en D o e k e l e , L y k l e en R y k l e ,
S e a k e l e en S i b b l e , J a k k e l e , N a m m e l e en O e b e l e .
En toch is dit het geval. Het aanhangsel tse (ts, tsen) is een Oud-
Friesche verkleinvorm, en le eveneens. Dit blijkt ook hier uit dat
velen dezer namen nog heden ook in onverkleinde vormen bij ons in
gebruik zijn. Bij voorbeeld: A t t e (de vrouwelijke verkleinvorm
A t s j e is vooral niet zeldzaam), F e i t e , H a i t e en H o a i t e ,
T j i t t e of T i e t e , M o n t e , A b e , E a b e , B a r t , D o e k e ,
N a m m e n (uit den verkleinvorm N a m m e l e is de n van den
oorspronkelijken vorm N a m m e n gesleten, omdat de n en de l te
veel op elkanderen stooten), O e b e (O b b e of U b b o ), enz. Het
Oud-Friesche verkleinende aanhangsel ts is volkomen een en het
zelfde als het Nieuw-Friesche aanhangsel ke. Immers zijn k en ts of
tsj wisselletters in het Friesch. De ts of tsj neemt in het Friesch en
Engelsch dikwijls de plaats in van de k in de verwante Germaansche
talen. Men denke aan tsjerke en church tegenover kerk en kirche,
aan tsjiis en cheese tegenover kaas en käse.

De hedendaagsche Friesche uitspraak van het Hollandsche

verkleinende aanhangsel tje als tsje, bij voorbeeld bytsje voor beetje,
potsje voor potje, Pytsje voor Pietje, enz. is eigenlijk en
oorspronkelijk tjse, tse, of ke. Zoo dat men eigenlijk byttsje (byt-tsje
= bytke) moest schrijven, met Pyttsje, pottsje, enz. Immers de
woorden byt, pot, Pyt eindigen uit zich zelven reeds op t, en ’t
aanhangsel tje of tse of tjse begint er mede. Even eens moest men
A t t s e (At-tse = At-ke = At-tje = de kleine A t t o ) schrijven, met
Ts j i t t s e , L u u t t s e n , enz., in plaats van A t s e , Ts j i t s e ,
L u u t s e n . Die aangaande deze ts = k, en tse of tjse = ke als
verkleinend aanhangsel iets naders weten wil, leze eene zeer
belangrijke aanteekening van onzen taalgeleerde J. H. Halbertsma,
bij zijn verhaal De treemter fen it Sint-Antoni-Gasthuws. [222]

Ook een zeer oud verkleinend aanhangsel is le, dat achter namen
als E a b e l e , D o e k e l e , N a m m e l e geplaatst is.
Oorspronkelijk is het volkomen een en het zelfde als het
verkleinende achtervoegsel lyn bij de oude Hollanders en
Vlamingen, als lein bij de hedendaagsche Hoogduitschers, in de
woorden maegdelyn, oogelyn, vogellyn (niet vogelijn), en blümlein,
röslein, äuglein.

Achter den verkleinvorm ke eischt de Oud-Hollandsche, alsook de

Hoogduitsche uitspraak eene n (b.v. roosken, meisken, en röschen,
mädchen), waar de Friesche uitspraak die n achterwege laat:
roaske, fanke. En zoo is het ook met den uitgang lyn of lein, die in
het Friesch, zonder n, als le luidt. Zoo als de oude Friezen in deze
zaak deden, spreken nog heden de Zwaben in Opper-Duitschland,
die rösle, mädle zeggen; terwijl de Zwitsers in hun röseli, maidli de i
nog laten hooren, maar de n ook niet.

Eene bijzondere oorzaak van het verval der Friesche namen is

gelegen in het onverstand van allerlei vreemde, onfriesche
predikanten en pastoors, schoolmeesters, notarissen, ambtenaren
van den burgerlijken stand, enz. in Friesland. Van ouds schreven de
Friezen natuurlijk hunne Friesche namen volgens de Friesche
spelling en niet volgens de Hollandsche of eene andere. Trouwens,
eene andere schrijfwijze is ook niet mogelijk, ten zij men er niet om
geve zoo men onzin voor den dag brengt. Die Friesche spelling van
Friesche namen en woorden is de eenig goede, en is door alle
Friezen, die slechts een weinig gevoel voor taalzuiverheid, slechts
een weinig kennis van spelling en letterwaarde hebben, dan ook
steeds gevolgd tot in deze eeuw. Sedert de helft dezer eeuw zijn er
al meer en meer vreemde, onfriesche, meest Hollandsche
onderwijzers, predikanten, pastoors en ambtenaren in de Friesche
gewesten aangesteld geworden. Sommigen van deze
vreemdelingen, ja bijna allen, geven den Friesche taal geenszins de
eere die haar toekomt, waardeeren haar niet of minachten haar,
omdat zij haar niet kennen, omdat zij haar dwazelijk uit der hoogte
aanzien voor een verbasterd en leelijk volksdialect. Anderen zelfs
haten haar, haten de Friesche taal omdat zij hun moeielijkheden in
den weg legt in hun verkeer met het Friesche volk, haten haar omdat
de Friesche taal hen dwingt zich in te spannen en nog wat te leeren
—een zware eisch voor waanwijze [223]betweters. Die willen dan wel
het Friesch schoeien op de Hollandsche leest, het Friesch dwingen
in het Hollandsche spoor, met andere woorden: zij willen Friesche
namen en woorden schrijven volgens Hollandsche spelregels en—
begaan dan domheden, waar mede zij den waren Friezen ergeren.
Deze schadelijke invloed van vreemdelingen op de Friesche taal,
waartegen de Stand-Friezen dienen te waken en zich krachtig te
verzetten, blijkt ook uit de dwaze spelling waarin heden ten dage
sommige Friesche namen in nieuwsbladen en andere openbare
geschriften voor ’t licht komen. Daar vindt men wel S i e t s c h e en
W i e t s c h e , J e t s c h e en V e t j e met V o k e l t j e en
V r o u w k j e , Z w o p k j e en Z w e i t s e , R i n z e en B i n z e ,
Ta e k e en Ta e t s c h e , Z ij t z e en V o l k e r t geschreven, in
plaats van S y t s k e en W y t s k e , J e t s k e en F e t s j e (F e t j e ),
F o k e l t s j e (F o k e l t j e ) en F r o u k j e , S w o b k j e ,
S w e i t s e , R i n s e , B i n s e , Te a k e , Te a t s k e , S y t s e en
Folkert.

Die tweeklank ie in plaats van den enkelen klank dien de Friezen

met y afbeelden, die ie waarmede de Hollanders meenen de
Friesche zuivere, lange i (y of î) te kunnen weêrgeven, is in namen
als S i e t s e en W i e b r e n in het geheel niet op zijne plaats. De ie
is in het Friesch immers duidelijk een tweeklank, gelijk zij
oorspronkelijk in het Hollandsch ook was, en nog heet. De Friezen
laten in hunne uitspraak dan ook zeer te recht nog duidelijk hooren
dat de ie een tweeklank is, in tegenoverstelling met de Hollanders
die deze oude en zuivere uitspraak verloren hebben, en geen
onderscheid meer kennen tusschen ie en i of y. Immers in het woord
wiet (nat) laten de Friezen eenen gants anderen klank hooren als in
W y t (s k e ), een onderscheid dat het verstompte gehoor der
Hollanders niet meer schijnt te kunnen vatten.—De sch in woorden
als school, schoen, schip, visch, wasschen wordt in het Friesch,
even als in de Noordsche talen, als sk uitgesproken: skoale, skoe,
skip, fisk, waskje. Door deze Friesche uitspraak in de war gebracht,
meenen sommige waanwijze vreemdelingen ook de sk in de namen
W y t s k e , G e l s k e , A n s k e , enz. als sche te moeten
verhollandschen, en er W i e t s c h e , G e l s c h e , A u s c h e van
te moeten maken. Intusschen, de sk in W y t s k e , G e l s k e ,
A n s k e komt geenszins overeen met de Hollandsche sch. O neen!
Immers in deze en soortgelijke [224]namen is sk slechts eene
toevallige samenvoeging van letters. Hier staan de s en de k slechts
bij toeval naast elkanderen, en vormen geenszins eene bijzondere
letterverbinding. Hier behoort de s aan de lettergrepen W y t s ,
G e l s en A n s (A n s o ), en de k is de eerste letter van het
verkleinende aanhangsel ke. Dus W y t s - k e (W y t s - k e , de kleine
—of vrouwelijke—W y t s e ), en niet Wyt-ske, Wyt-sche of Wiet-sche.
—De Friesche taal kent geen letter ij, zooals de Hollandsche tongval
en het hedendaagsche geijkte Nederlandsch. Men kan, of liever mag
dus niet W ij t s e , S ij t s e , W ij b r e n , S ij b o u t schrijven.
W y t s e , S y t s e , W y b r e n , S y b o u t of S i b o u t moet het
wezen. Ook kent de Friesche taal niet de letters v en z. Die halve,
verloopene, vloeiende en suizende medeklinkers zijn te flauw en te
zwevende voor de Friesche tonge; zij worden in het Friesch door f
en s vervangen. Dat men dus niet Z ij t z e , B i n z e , Z w e i t z e en
Z w o p k j e , noch ook V e t j e , V r a n k , V e d d e , V o l k e r t of
V o l m e r schrijve, maar F e t s j e (F e t j e ), F r a n k , F e d d e ,
F o l k e r t , F o l m e r met S y t s e , B i n s e , S w e i t s e en
S w o b k j e . Even min schrijve men de bijzondere Friesche en
Engelsche tweeklank ea (in de woorden brea of bread, dea of dead),
waar deze klank in Friesche persoonsnamen voorkomt, als ae, als of
het een Oud-Hollandsche lange a ware. Dus niet A e b e , Ta e k e ,
Ta e t s c h e , A e d e , P a e z e n s gelijk men heden ten dage wel
doet, maar E a b e , Te a k e , Te a t s k e , E a d e (of Æ b e ,
Æ d e ) en P e a s e n s .

Mogen zulke misvormde namen nooit meer worden geschreven! Dat

de Friezen zich niet door allerlei vreemdelingen allerlei knollen voor
citroenen in de handen laten stoppen. Maar dat zij zuiver Friesch
mogen blijven, ook in de goede Friesche spelling hunner Friesche
namen! Immers, men kan geen Friesche woorden en namen, geen
Friesche klanken met Hollandsche letterteekens afbeelden. Die dit
nochtans doet, die W i e t s c h e schrijft en Z ij t z e , Ta e k e en
V e t j e , handelt even dwaas als de man die Engelsche, Duitsche en
Fransche namen met Hollandsche klanken en letterverbindingen
afbeeldt—die dus Dzjeems, Loedwieg en Zjaak, of Swensie,
Karrelsroe en Bordo schrijven zoude, in stede van J a m e s ,
L u d w i g , J a c q u e s , S w a n s e a , K a r l s r u h e en
B o r d e a u x . [225]

Alles wisselt, verandert, verslijt, teert uit, sterft af, in ’t

ondermaansche. Alles! Ook de bijzonderheden in zeden, taal en
kleeding der Friezen, al hoe trouw anders de Friezen in den regel
ook gehecht zijn aan de eigenaardigheden, door hunne edele en
roemrijke voorouders hen overgeleverd. In deze zaken toch zijn de
hedendaagsche Friezen geenszins meer de zelfden, die ze van ouds
geweest zijn, die ze nog voor honderd en voor vijftig jaren waren.
Zelfs kan de opmerkzame veel korter tijdsbestek noemen, om
veranderingen aan te toonen. Ook in de Friesche mans- en
vrouwennamen doet zich deze wisseling en verslijting, dit afsterven
of buiten gebruik raken bemerken—al is dit ook betrekkelijk gering
en weinig, veel minder dan bij onze stamverwante volken met hunne
volkseigene namen geschiedt. Maar toch droeg deze en gene onder
onze voorouders in de middeleeuwen en later eenen naam die thans
onder ons niet meer gehoord wordt. Ja zelfs in de vorige eeuw nog
kwamen onder de Friezen sommige namen, goed Oud-Friesche
namen voor, die men thans slechts uiterst zeldzaam of in het geheel
niet meer aan kinderen geeft, ’t en zij dan in veranderden vorm, als
R i c h j e voor R i x t a , L u t s k e voor L u x t a , J e l t s j e voor
J i l d o u , R e i n t s j e voor R e i n o u . Ook in deze zaak heerscht —
— de mode! Sedert de helft dezer eeuw vooral schijnt het alsof de
Friesche namen sommigen ontaarden Friezen niet meer goed
genoeg zijn. Die verbasterden en verbijsterden tooien hun kroost,
dwaas genoeg! liever met de romantische namen van allerlei
vreemde lui, vooral liefst met Fransche en Engelsche namen, dan
met de eenvoudige en eerlijke namen der eigene voorouders. Hier
en daar is er onder ons eene ijdele moeder en een zwakke vader die
aan zoontje of dochterke niet den Frieschen naam geven van
hunnen eigenen vader, van hunne eigene moeder, gelijk de Friesche
zede dit van ouds eischt, maar eenen vreemden, eenen
zoogenoemd mooien naam. Daartoe wordt dan de Friesche naam,
die het kind rechtmatig toekomt, verknoeid en verdraaid,
zoogenoemd verfraaid, maar in der daad misvormd en onkenbaar
gemaakt. Of wel—men bedenkt maar eenen geheel vreemden
naam, hoe vreemder en romantischer, hoe mooier; bij voorbeeld:
A u r e l i a voor A u k j e ; E l l a voor J e l t s j e ; H e n r i voor
H a r k e ; G e o r g voor G o s s e ; T i t u s voor T i e t e of Ts j i t t e ,
enz. [226]Dwaas, die zoo handelen! Onwaardig, onfriesch, die zoo
doen! Zal men den kinderen de oude en eervolle namen der eigene
ouders en voorouders onthouden, die kenmerken hunner Friesche
afstamming, de edelste onder de Germanen? Zal men ze tooien (?)
met de soms verachtelijke namen van vreemde schurken en
schelmen, hoeren en snoeren misschien? Neen immers! Geen ware
Fries, geen Stand-Fries zal aldus zijn kroost ontadelen.

Behalve deze dwaze en treurige gezindheid, die het vreemde,

opgesmukte, opzichtige, gekunstelde in alle opzichten verkiest
boven het eigene, eenvoudig-schoone, degelijke,—eene gezindheid
die gelukkiger wijze onder de Friezen nog weinig voorkomt, minder
dan bij eenig ander volk—is daar nog eene andere reden die het
uitsterven en verbasteren van Friesche namen ten gevolge heeft.
Die reden is gelegen in de meening welke niet weinigen, overigens
goed Frieschen Friezen eigen is, dat de Friesche namen leelijk zijn,
leelijk klinken, dat het slechts zinlooze klanken zijn, en dat zij den
dragers van die namen iets onbeschaafds, iets weinig
gedistingueerds (basterd-woorden passen bij verbasterde
gezindheden) zouden verleenen. En fijn beschaafd en gepolitoerd
(op zijn Fransch, God betere ’t!), ook gedistingueerd (al is het dan
ook valsch) willen er heden ten dage zoo velen zijn!
Nu—ik wil hier ook niet ten eenen male ontkennen dat sommige
Friesche namen, zoo wel van mannen als van vrouwen, in der daad
niet schoon van klank en vorm zijn. Ik kan mij zeer wel voorstellen
dat deze of gene, met een fijn ontwikkeld gehoor en met goeden
smaak begaafd, namen als S j e r p , N a m m e l e , O e g e ,
Oebele, Goaitsen, Durk, Harm, Freark, Olfert,
H o a t s e , J i s k , G o u k e , G u r b e , W o p k e , namen als
Eke, Baeye, Akke, Wobbeltsje, Gatske,
Jisseltsje, Nammentsje, Murkje, Jaeike,
S j o e r d t s j e , leelijk, zeer leelijk, op den duur ondragelijk vindt.
Maar aan deze, in zich zelven reeds misvormde, verkorte namen is
men immers ook niet gebonden! Men kan die namen in hunnen
oorspronkelijken, volledigen, onverbasterden vorm herstellen. Dan
zijn ze niet leelijk, noch zonder zin. Hier boven hebben wij dit reeds
aangetoond bij ’t behandelen der namen E k e of E e l k j e , E e l k e
of E e l t s j e met S j o e r d en S j o e r d t s j e , F r e a r k en S i e r k
enz. Als eene kleine proeve, hoe men in deze zaak te handelen
[227]hebbe, wil ik aan het einde van deze verhandeling een lijstje
geven van eenige hedendaagsche, verbasterde en verkorte Friesche
namen, met hunne Oud-Friesche, volledige vormen daar achter.

Al geef ik toe dat eenige, zelfs vele hedendaagsch Friesche namen

leelijke, wanklinkende, onbehagelijke vormen vertoonen, dit is toch
geenszins bij allen het geval. De mansnamen A l l e r t , E d s a r d of
I d s e r t , A l e f , A l g e r , A y o l t (meest in Groningerland in
gebruik), B r u c h t , F r a n k , J i l d e r t , W y b r a n d , S y b r a n d
en G e r b r a n d , O n n o , G e r l o f , Ts j a l l i n g , H a y o ,
Hillebrand, Hubert, Hero, Ivo, Meinert,
R e i n d e r t , Ta c o , H a r t g e r , en de vrouwennamen
B r e c h t j e , Y m k j e , S i b r i c h en W i b r i c h , A u k j e ,
M i n k e , W y t s k e en S y t s k e , W y p k j e , R i n s k e , E l s k e ,
G e e s k e zijn namen die, al zijn het ten deele ook slechts
verdraaide en verkorte namen, toch geenszins leelijk van klank en
vorm zijn te noemen. Deze en vele soortgelijke namen hebben in de
mansnamen iets krachtigs, edels, manhaftigs, in de vrouwennamen
iets liefelijks, ongekunstelds, dat Fries en uitman behaagt. Maar, het
zij dat men nu deze namen in deze vormen aanhoude of afschaffe,
het zij men ze tot hunne oorspronkelijke zuivere vormen terug
brenge, men wachte zich wel die namen nog meer te verdraaien, in
de meening ze te verfraaien. Ware misbaksels en monsters van
namen zijn er al, door dat zoogenoemde „mooier maken”, door
weinig belezene en weinig beschaafde, door smakelooze menschen
tot stand gebracht. Die R o m k j e tot R o m e l i a , W o b k j e tot
W o b b i n a , G e e s k e tot G e z i e n a , E l s k e tot E l z i e n a ,
A a l t j e tot A l i d a , J e l t j e tot J e l l i n a , S j o e r d t j e tot
S j o e r d i n a , F o k e l t j e tot F o k e l i n a , of D o e d e tot
D o e d e r u s , S i b b l e tot S y b i l l u s , A n n e tot A n n e e ,
F e d d e tot F e d d e r u s , E a b e l e tot A b e l i u s , T i m e n tot
T i m o t h e u s , B a r t e l e tot B a r t h o l o m e u s , J e n t j e tot
G e n t i u s , H e s s e l tot H e s s e l i u s , J i l l e r t tot J i l l a r d u s
maakt, geeft daar door een bewijs van onverstand en wansmaak.
Gelukkig is deze dwaasheid bij ons Friesche volk tusschen Flie en
Lauwers, dus bij de kern des geheelen Frieschen volks, veel minder
in zwang dan bij de andere Friesche stammen, vooral bij
Groningerlanders en Oost-Friezen. Dezen maken van R o e l f k e ,
S w a a n t j e , G e r k j e , G e e r t j e , L a m m e c h i e n en
L u b b e c h i e n (in ’t [228]eigenlijke Friesland L a m k j e en
L u b k j e ), van F r o u k j e , enz. R o e l f i n a , S w a a n t i n a ,
G e r c o l i n a , G e e r t j e d i n a , L a m m e c h i e n a en
L u b b e c h i e n a , F r o u k e l i n a , enz.; de Oost-Friezen van
H a i k e (de vrouwelijke vorm van H a y o ), H a y o n e t t a en
H a y o l i n a , van G e e s k e , H i l k e en L u b k e wel G e e s k e a ,
H i l k e a en L u b k e a . Dit zijn ware monsters van namen,
wannamen, die hoe eer hoe liever buiten gebruik moeten gesteld
worden, en die geen waarlijk beschaafd man zijnen kinderen geven
zal. Dan nog maar liever geheel vreemde namen, zoo als zij doen
die eenen knaap, welke naar zijnen grootvader H e t t e of T i e t e
moest heeten, H e c t o r of T i t u s noemen, of een meiske dat den
naam van hare grootmoeder A u k j e of H e i l t j e toekwam,
A u r e l i a of H e l e n a noemen—al geeft zulke handelwijze dan ook
getuigenis van onfriesche gezindheid, van weinig gevoel voor de
eere van ’t eigene volk, van de eigene voorouders. Dat men echter
oorspronkelijk onfriesche namen als K l a a s , T h ij s , P i e r , J a n
en K e e s , als N e e l t j e , L e e n t j e , T r ij n t j e , G r i e t j e ,
A n g e n i e t j e , M a r t j e , enz., die grootendeels ook bij de
Hollanders en andere Nederlanders in deze vormen voorkomen,
terug brengt tot de oude volle vormen N i c o l a a s , M a t t h e u s ,
Petrus, Johannes, Cornelis, Cornelia,
M a g d a l e n a , C a t h a r i n a , M a r g a r e t h a , A g n e s en
M a r t h a , daar kan niemand wat op tegen hebben. Dat druischt niet
in tegen den goeden smaak. In tegendeel, die volle namen zijn verre
weg te verkiezen boven de hier vermelde verdraaide en ingekorte
verbasteringen daar van.

Reeds in de vorige eeuw is men begonnen sommige Frieschen

mansnamen, die op eene toonlooze e eindigen (H o b b e , Y n t e ,
H a r k e ), welluidender, aannemelijker te maken door die e met eene
o te verwisselen, en dus van bovengenoemde namen H o b b o ,
I n t o , H a r c o te maken. Deze namen, op o eindigende, vertoonen
in der daad, volkomen of ten naasten bij, de Oud-Friesche vormen,
waarvan de namen op toonlooze e slechts verbasteringen,
afslijtingen uitmaken. Men handelt dus zeer redelijk zoo men die
oorspronkelijke o weêr in zijn recht herstelt. Ook zijn deze
naamsvormen, op o uitgaande, eigenlijk nooit geheel buiten gebruik
geweest, ook in de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw niet. [229]In
sommige aanzienlijke maagschappen hield men dien vorm op o
steeds in gebruik, al was het dat bij boeren, burgers en geringe
lieden de toonlooze e in plaats van die o getreden was. In Oost-
Friesland en Groningerland is deze o nooit zoo algemeen door de e
verdrongen geweest, als in Friesland bewesten Lauwers. Ook heden
nog treft men in die gewesten meer Friesche namen in hunnen
oorspronkelijk op o uitgaanden vorm aan, dan in ’t eigenlijke
Friesland. Men kan veilig de namen, op toonlooze e eindigende, in
beteren vorm herstellen door eene o de plaats van die e te doen
innemen; door bij voorbeeld van A i s e en van S i b e , van H a l b e
en van W y t s e , van R i n s e en van M i n n e , van A t s e en van
L y k e l e te maken A i s o en S i b o , H a l b o en W y t s o , R i n s o
en M i n n o of M e n n o , A t s o en L y k l o . Maar men doet beter,
men handelt in taalkundig opzicht wetenschappelijker, men bereikt in
den regel ook beter zijn doel (te weten het herstellen der namen in
zuiverder en welluidender vormen), zoo men die namen welke op tse
en le uitgaan (A t s e , F e t s e , S e a k e l e , L y k e l e , O e b e l e )
en die, gelijk op bl. 213 en vervolgens reeds is aangetoond, eigenlijk
slechts verkleinvormen zijn—eerst herstelle in den oorspronkelijken,
onverkleinden vorm, en er dan de o achter plaatse. Zoo men dus
van A t s e en F e t s e (A t - t s e en F e d - t s e , de kleine A t t e en
de kleine F e d d e ) maakt A t t o en F e d d o ; van S e a k e l e en
O e b e l e , S a c o en U b o (men spreke O e b o ). Zie hier, als
verdere voorbeelden, eenige Friesche mansnamen in den
hedendaags meest gebruikelijken, versletenen vorm, met den
oorspronkelijken Oud-Frieschen vorm er achter.

A b b e —A b b o .
A b e , A b e l e , E a b e , E a b e l e —A b o .
A d d e —A d d o .
A d e , E a d e , E d e —A d o , E d o .
A g e —A g o .
A g g e , E g g e —A g g o , E g g o .
A i k e —A i c o .
A i l k e —A i l c o .
A i s e , E i s e —A i s o , E i s o .
A l e , A l l e —A l o , A l l o .
E p p e , E p k e —E p p o , E p c o .
A t e , A t t e —A t o , A t t o .
A u k e —A u c o , A v o .
B a u w e , B a u k e —B a v o .
B o u w e , B o u k e —B u v o .
B o t e —B o t h o .
B r u i n —B r u n o .
D o e d e —D o d o .
D o e k e , D o e k e l e —D u c o , [230]in zuiverder, onverkleinden
vorm echter D o d o .
E d e —E d o .
E e l k e , E e l t j e —E e l c o ; in zuiverder, onverkleinden vorm
echter A d e l .
F e y e , F e i k e —F e y o , F e i c o .
F o k k e , F o e k e —F o c c o , F u c c o .
F o l k e —F u l c o .
H a y e , H a i k e , H a i t e , H a i t s e —H a y o , H a i c o ; de
laatste vorm is niet te verkiezen.
H e r e , H e e r e , H e a r e , H j e r r e —H e r o .
O e d s —O d o , U d o (spreek O e d o ).
O e n e —O n n o , U n o (spreek O e n o ).
P o p p e , P o p k e —P o p p o , P o p c o ; de laatste vorm is
niet te verkiezen.
S a k e , S a k e l e , S e k e l e , S e a k e l e —S a c o .
Ta k e , Te a k e , Te k e , Te k e l e , Te a k e l e —Ta c o .
S c h e l t e —S c e l t o .
S o l k e —S o l c o .
Ta d e , Te a d e —Ta d o .
T i e d e , T i e t e , T j i t t e , T j i t s e —T h i e d o of T h e o d o .
S i b e , S i b b e , S i p p e , S i p k e , S i b b e l e —S i b o ,
Sibbo.
 W i b e —W i b o .
U i l k e , U i l t j e , U i l t z e n —U l o .
W i t e , W i t t e , W y t s e —W i t o .
W o b b e , W o p , W o p k e —W u b b o .

Van deze soort van eenvoudige, zoogenoemde stamnamen zijn

H a y o , H u g o , O n n o , O t t o , M e n n o , B e n n o , enz.
steeds in gebruik geweest, ook bij de andere volksstammen in de
Nederlanden en Duitschland.

Geheel in overeenstemming met de bovengenoemde mansnamen

kan men de toonlooze e, waarop vele hedendaagsch Friesche
vrouwennamen eindigen, veranderen in eene a. Die namen
herkrijgen daar door veelal hunnen ouden, oorspronkelijken vorm, en
worden tevens welluidender en aannemelijker. Zoo kan men van
Te t , Te t t e of Te t s j e maken Te t t a , van A t h of A t s j e A t t a ,
en M i n n a van M i n k e of M i n t s j e .

De Friesche vrouwennamen komen heden ten dage meest in

verkleinvormen voor; gaan dus veelal op je, tje, kje, ke uit. Zoo men
deze onnoodige, meestal leelijke verkleinvormen eerst van de
namen afneemt, en dan eene a voegt achter den overblijvenden
[231]naamsstam, dan verkrijgt men in den regel den oorspronkelijken
vorm van den naam. Zoo men dus van Y t s j e of I t s j e (eigenlijk
I d - t j e of Y d - t j e ) den verkleinvorm tje wegneemt, en achter den
overblijvenden naamsstam I d of Y d eene a voegt, is de naam in
zijnen oorspronkelijken en schoonen vorm I d a hersteld.

Zie hier, als verdere voorbeelden, eenige Friesche vrouwennamen in

den hedendaags meest gebruikelijken vorm, met den
oorspronkelijken Oud-Frieschen vorm daar achter.
D e t j e —D e d d a .
E l s k e , E l s j e —E l s a .
F r o u k j e —F r o u w a , F r o w a ; de laatste is de beste vorm.
H e i l t j e —H e i l a .
H i l t j e , H i k k e , H y l t j e , H y l k j e , H i k e —H i l d a .
H o u k j e , H o l k j e —H o l d a .
Y n s k j e —I n a .
J e l t j e , J e i k e —J e l l a .
B o n t j e —B o n n a .
B o t j e —B o t h a .
M e i n t j e —M e i n a ; in den alleroudsten vorm M e g i n a of
Magina.
F e t j e , (F e d - t j e )—F e d d a .
F o k j e , F o e k j e , F o k e l t j e —F o c c a , F u c c a , F o c a .
Y m k j e , I m k j e , E m k j e —I m a , I m m a , E m m a .
E a d s k e , A t j e —A d a .
R e i n t j e —R e i n a ; in den alleroudsten vorm R e g i n a of
R a g i n a , waarbij men echter niet aan het Latijnsche woord
regina (koningin) te denken hebbe.
G e e s j e , G e e s k e —G e s a . De meer bijzonder Oud-
Duitsche vorm G i s e l a (ook een verkleinvorm), kan ook zeer
wel in de plaats van G e e s k e genomen worden.
E p k j e , E p j e —E p p a .
A a f k e —A v a .
D o e t j e (d.i. D o e d - t j e ), D o e k j e , D o e k e l t j e —D o d a .
D o u t j e , D o u w t s e n —D u v a .
D i e u w k e , D i e u w e r t j e —D i u v a , D i e t w a r a ,
Thiadware.
H a i t s k e , H a i k j e , H a i t j e —H a y a .
G e e l t j e , G e a l t j e —G e l a .
H i t j e (H i d - t j e )—H i d d a .
T i e t j e —T h i e d a of T h e o d a .
De namen A d a , E m m a , I d a zijn van ouds her ook bij andere
Germaansche volken buiten Friesland in gebruik gebleven. De
meeste overigen hebben alleen de Friezen behouden. [232]

Ten slotte nog geef ik hier eene lijst van Friesche persoonsnamen in
hunnen hedendaagschen, verbasterden en verkleinden vorm, met
de oude, oorspronkelijke, volle vormen daar achter. De letters m en v
achter de namen duiden aan of zij mans- of vrouwennamen zijn.

A a r t , A r e n t , A a n m.—A r n of ook A r n o l d .
A l g e r . m.—A d e l g a r .
A l l e r t . m.—A d e l h a r t .
A n d e l e . m.—A n d o .
A a f j e , A a f k e . v.—A v a of ook A b a .
A a l t j e . v.—A d e l a .
A n s k e . m.—A n s o .
A u k e . m.—A u d o , A u c o of A v o .
A u k j e . v.—A u d a of A v a .
B e a n , B a a r t , B e e r t , B e r e n d , B a r e n d , m.—
Bernhard.
B a a r t j e , B a a t j e , B e r e n d j e (B e r e n d i n a ). v.—
Bernharda.
B a u w e . m.—B a v o .
B a u k j e , B a a i e . v.—B a v a .
B a r t e l e , B a r t l e . m.—B a r t of B r e c h t en B a r t h o l d .
B a r t e l t j e , B a r t j e , B r e c h t j e , v.—B a r t h a of
B e r t h a , of B r e c h t a en B a r t h o l d a .
B o u w e . m.—B u v o .
B o u k j e . v.—B u v a .
B i n n e , B i n s e , B e n t e , m.—B e n n o .
Bentje, Benskje, Bints, Binke, Bintje,
B i n t s k e , v.—B e n n a .
B e n n e r t , B i n n e r t . m.—B e r n h a r d .
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookfinal.com