By the time Anthony Trollope published his autobiographical The Three Clerks, he had established himself as a novelist who resisted the didactic fiction on which his mother, Frances Trollope, had made her name. He did not shy away from tales with moral dilemmas; rather, he did not comment on those conflicts faced by his characters, choosing, instead, to reserve judgment on their realistic actions. He had proven this approach in Barchester Towers (1857), published three months before he completed work on The Three Clerks.

Due to the subject matter of The Three Clerks, however, Trollope slipped into an accusatory tone and a heavy-handed characterization that qualified as caricature of the public-service men who controlled the fate of the clerks he depicted. Trollope had worked unhappily as a postal clerk for several years before moving to Ireland, where he became more independent and finally proved himself a success. In those early years, he suffered at the hands of his superiors, who adhered to a promotion system with which Trollope did not agree.

In the novel, Harry Norman suffers from the discrimination that Trollope experienced throughout the flawed civil-service system. He describes various levels on which one might take a post as a civil servant, including the fictional Internal Navigation Office, considered higher than the Post Office.

Harry Norman works with Alaric Tudor at the Weights and Measures Office and, along with Alaric’s cousin Charley Tudor, visits often Mrs. Woodward and her three daughters. The Woodward family composition of a widowed mother with three attractive daughters became a staple in Trollope’s fiction, a tribute to the real-life Grant family, who played a large role in his life as a young man.

When Harry falls in love with the eldest daughter, Gertrude, he is bested by Alaric, who receives a promotion following a successful scoring on the civil service exam. Alaric proves by nature more competitive, aggressive, and ambitious, attributes valued by his superiors more than the good character of Harry. Gertrude agrees to marry Alaric, but financial problems arise due to his foolish investments.

With this plot turn, Trollope suggests that high test scores do not always represent intelligence, a rationalization of his own poor showing on the job in his early years. He reproduces early in the novel his experience on an entry exam, when he had misspelled and blotted words from a passage he was asked to copy from the Times newspaper and embarrassed himself due to his lack of math skills. Trollope later opposed such testing, arguing that exams could be passed simply through a cramming technique that in no way reflected one’s honesty or sense of responsibility.

Far worse than simple bad investments is Alaric’s panicked embezzlement of company funds to pay his debts. He is caught and sent to prison, serving a sentence that may seem to readers more a result of his betraying his friendship with Harry than of his illegal activities. Thus, Alaric’s ambition suggests a character flaw leading to immorality.

Trollope offers a metaphor of the political games that proved Alaric’s downfall with his depiction of the hunting of badgers by dogs, an activity that he had regularly observed as a child on the Hampshire downs. He suggests that members of the House of Commons routinely play both roles, depending on which party was in power.

Charley represents a foil for his cousin, working diligently to repay his debt and overcome a youthful weakness that threatened to leave him broke and trapped in an imprudent relationship with a common barmaid named Norah Geraghty. His situation suggests Trollope’s own prior to his transfer to Ireland. Trollope writes in his autobiography of the selling of his £12 debt to a professional moneylender, which caused his debt to grow.

A collector embarrassed him at work, a scene reproduced in The Three Clerks but characterized as far more horrible. While Trollope suffered pursuit by a presentable elderly man, the horrible character Mr. Jabez M’Ruen, whose dirty room near Mecklenburgh Square Charley is forced to visit, haunts poor Charley.

Simultaneously, Harry marries the second of the Woodward daughters, Linda, and becomes a country squire. After championing his problems, Charley takes the third daughter, Katie, as a wife, having proven himself literally a hero by rescuing her from drowning in the Thames. Charley is promoted into the Weights and Measures office, with a far more promising future there than either Alaric or Harry had enjoyed.

Readers cannot miss the heavy-handed symbolism in the setting, where a man’s honor is weighed and measured according to his propensity for advancement on the job. Charley and Harry prosper, while Alaric and his family become outcasts, immigrating to Australia to settle there with many other English convicts.

While the civil service did eventually undergo necessary reforms, Trollope’s book did not promote those reforms. Rather, it acted as a type of revenge for him against an early miserable working experience that silenced and threatened to rob him of a strong self-identity. Having gained a public voice and the accompanying audience, he offered his readers a firsthand view into a corrupt system while enjoying a catharsis in its production.

Bibliography
Glendinning, Victoria. Anthony Trollope. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Super, R. H. Trollope in the Post Office. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981.
Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. London: Blackwood, 1883.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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