Anthony Trollope first began work on He Knew He Was Right at the end of 1867, following in that same year the publication of The Last Chronicle of Barset, the final entry in the series that had won him fame and critical acclaim. Also in 1867, Trollope published what later critics judged his best short novel, The Claverings. In the twelve years since introducing readers to the world of Barsetshire, Trollope had published nineteen novels along with numerous short stories, sketches, essays, and travel pieces. He had become an institution in the world of fiction.

At that point in his career, feeling assured of success, he at last left the post office where he had worked for over thirty years and became editor of St. Paul’s Magazine. Its owner, James Virtue, purchased Trollope’s novel Phineas Finn to serialize in the magazine, then paid Trollope the most money he had ever received in advance for his next novel. The lengthy He Knew He Was Right was serialized from October 1868 through May 1869. Virtue and Company publishers had planned a 32-weekly-part issue but went bankrupt in early 1869, necessitating that a different company print the final three parts, still under the Virtue name. That misfortune was compounded by the lukewarm critical reception of the book.

Later critics suggested the lack of popular and critical success may have in part been due to Trollope’s prodigious output; critics had grown tired of dealing with his multiple books per year, and the public missed the Barset crowd with which they had grown so familiar. It disappointed his faithful readers by varying from his traditional output but did not vary enough to attract new readers. Only novelist and critic Henry James recognized the quality in the novel that later critics emphasized.

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Like all Trollope’s works, the plot of He Knew He Was Right moves at a snail’s pace. That proved crucial to framing the gradual decline into a paralyzing insanity of its protagonist, Louis Trevelyan. Educated and from a privileged background, Trevelyan marries Emily Rowley, who comes from a large family of eight daughters headed by a colonial administrator, Sir Marmaduke Rowley.

In one of several subplots, Emily’s sister, Nora, will fall in love with Trevelyan’s friend Hugh Stanbury, although she is courted by the wealthy and well-placed Mr. Charles Glascock. At first a seemingly traditional Victorian woman, Nora cautions Emily against refusing to “obey” Trevelyan, who makes demands that Emily defines as a “gross insult.” As her sister, Nora knows Emily is truly upset: “As she spoke the fire flashed from her eye, and the bright red colour of her cheek told a tale of her anger.” However, Trollope allows Nora to undergo a change in attitude. While Emily is doomed to suffer a terrible marriage, Nora will eventually throw over convention and make a solid love match.

As part of Trollope’s focus on “the woman question,” the debate over women’s proper social roles, Nora intellectually chooses first what promises to be a loveless but ambitious union. Additional characters drawing attention to a woman’s place in Victorian society include Aunt Stanbury and Wallachia Petrie, both spinsters enjoying the power and freedom that lack of a spouse affords them. Although they share the basic single lifestyle, the two women represent foils.

While Aunt Stanbury retains control over an inherited fortune against threats of other family members, she does not support militant feminism. She finds suffragettes offensive in their demand that women vote and enter traditionally male vocations, and she judges increasingly open female interaction with males as a sign that women “are very far gone on the road to the devil.” However, her own independent lifestyle makes difficult her judgment of other women who desire the same.

Wallachia contrasts with Aunt Stanbury in her outspoken and overt feminism. In Trollope’s hands, she becomes a strident caricature, one of several he would include in his fiction. Supposedly she is based on the real American feminist Kate Field, whom Trollope met in Italy in 1860 while visiting his brother Adolphus, a popular person in a Florentine social circle that included Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, also supporters of women’s rights.

Field and Trollope developed an affection, despite their differences. When Field later playfully accused Trollope of injecting her as a buffoon into his novel, he responded that he had never said Kate resembled Wallachia. He had merely said that their attitudes were the same and that Wallachia was “only absurd in her mode of expressing them.” Despite his negative attitudes toward feminists, Trollope reveals his sympathy for women held hostage by an obviously patriarchal system. Both Emily and Nora mention that women are little better socially situated than dogs.

Raised in the Mandarin Islands, Emily is somewhat more independent than her English sisters. While Emily conducts herself with integrity, Trevelyan becomes suspicious of her interactions with members of their high society circle, in particular one Colonel Osborne. A longtime friend of Sir Marmaduke, Osborne has a reputation as a womanizer, and Trevelyan forbids Emily to receive him in their home.

After making his demand, he recalled someone telling him “that no man should look for a wife from among the tropics, the women educated amidst the languors of those sunny climes rarely came to possess those high ideas of conjugal duty and feminine truth which a man should regard as the first requisites of a good wife.” His Othello-like descent is clearly one lacking motivation, the suggestion being that for all of Trevelyan’s distinction and privilege, his character proves weak.

Emily dotes on their son and decides the family is worth preserving, so she agrees to what seems a ridiculous demand, even though it embarrasses her with an old family friend. Seemingly convinced by Emily’s good faith, Trevelyan at first relents, allowing Osborne back into their home, then becomes more possessive than before, again forbidding Emily’s reception of him. As his obsession increases, Emily confronts him, declaring that she cannot promise to never see Osborne.

Trollope emphasizes women’s victimization by society, suggesting the great harm that will be done to Emily’s reputation should Trevelyan persist in his accusations. Emily’s upright character allows her to adhere to the law’s demand that she obey her husband, but she cannot submit to his spiritual abuse. Unbending, Trevelyan succeeds in driving her to a separation.

The next portion of the novel reveals just how far Trevelyan’s jealousy has transported him. Convinced of Emily’s adultery, he hires a private detective and places his wife under constant surveillance. In a move both pitiful and chilling, Trevelyan eventually kidnaps his son and takes him to Italy. There, ironically framed by some of the most beautiful scenery in the world and surrounded by warmth and the sun’s healing light, Trevelyan’s moods darken as he is gripped by a cold madness.

The ever-faithful Emily rescues him, locating Trevelyan and her son and bringing them back to England. Almost too far gone for redemption, Trevelyan lies dying when Emily begs him for a sign that he did acknowledge her innocence. She places two fingers on his lips and asks him to kiss them. For a moment she fears he will not comply: “She had time to think that were she once to withdraw her hand, she would be condemned for ever;—and that it must be withdrawn. But at length the lips moved, and with struggling ear she could hear the sound of the tongue within, and the verdict of the dying man had been in her favour.”

In an ironic turn, Trollope adopts the act of the kiss, often planted on a hero’s cheek as an accusation of guilt, to indicate innocence. The narrator does not equivocate over the results of Trevelyan’s misguided act, referring to “the evil that he had done” to a “woman whom he had so cruelly misused.” The novel concludes not on a happy note, but at least looks toward the future for several of its many characters, most especially Nora and Hugh, who decide to marry.

P. D. Edwards suggests that Trollope may have found inspiration for his plot in an 1866 Spectator article titled “Madness in Novels.” Its writer mourned “the inability of a novelist such as Mrs. Henry Wood to ‘paint jealousy in its extreme forms’ without resorting to sensationalism,” adding that she lacked “the power to create Othello, or the art to paint, as [William Makepeace] Thackeray or Trollope might have done, the morbid passion in its naturalistic nineteenth-century dress.”

For whatever reason, Trollope accepted that challenge. He fashioned Trevelyan’s mental dissolution with a psychological perspective that avoids suggestions of imbecility. In addition, by making so much at stake for Emily based on her husband’s insanity, Trollope assured acceptance on his reader’s part of the mental illness. He also avoids placing the traditional marriage relationship at risk as a popular institution by guiding additional couples in the novel to embrace marriage, despite its clearly damaging effects to Emily. While not Trollope’s most popular novel, He Knew He Was Right remains a ready topic for study in academia and in demand by Trollope aficionados.

Bibliography
Edwards, P. D., ed. Introduction to He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope. St. Lucia, Queensland: Queensland University Press, 1974.
Mullen, Richard. Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in His World. London: Duckworth, 1990.
Mullen, Richard, and James Munson, eds. The Penguin Companion to Trollope. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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