Plotting colonial authority - Trollope’s Ireland,1845-1860

  Plotting colonial authority: Trollope’s Ireland, – In taking up his position for the Post Office in Ireland in , Anthony Trollope – like so many other men of his time and place – migrated to a colony to better himself professionally and economically.¹ According to his own report in An Autobiography (), his peers among the clerks in the London office did not view the move as especially clever: ‘‘There was . . . a conviction that nothing could be worse than the berth of a surveyor’s clerk in Ireland . . . It was probably thought then that none but a man absurdly incapable would go on such a mission to the west of Ireland.’’² Yet the material benefits were considerable, as Trollope soon realized, particularly compared to English conditions of paid work: My salary in Ireland was to be but £ a year; but I was to receive fifteen shillings a day for every day that I was away from home, and sixpence for every mile that I travelled. The same allowances were made in England; but at that time travelling in Ireland was done at half the English prices. My income in Ireland, after paying my expenses, became at once £. This was the first good fortune of my life. (An Autobiography –) Financially speaking, then, it is no exaggeration to say that ‘‘Ireland made Trollope.’’³ Moreover, his position there not only increased his income and earned him preferment back in England: it also gave him the material for his first two novels, The Macdermots of Ballycloran () and The Kellys and the O’Kellys (), as well as three subsequent ones – Castle Richmond (), An Eye for an Eye (), and The Landleaguers (–) – all set primarily in Ireland. Trollope thus experienced the colony as literary capital even after he returned to England. And from the first, his employment as a traveling colonial administrator was intertwined with his work as a novelist-to-be. By contrast with the previous one, this chapter charts the westward flow of mid-century imperial traffic, with a focus on the ‘‘good fortune’’ of one Englishman rather than the material and discursive immiseration  of the Irish many. In the vast differences between the passage from England to Ireland as against the movement in the other direction, we could no doubt read many lessons about the uneven exchanges that colonial power produced and sanctioned at this moment; some of Trollope’s own fictions will refigure the ones I have traced in previous chapters. But rather than dwelling on their differences, I want to begin by acknowledging a single similarity between Trollope and all those nameless immigrants: like those new arrivals he no doubt observed en masse on the docks when he boarded his boat, and those he saw leaving Ireland when he disembarked at Kingstown, Trollope traveled not necessarily because he wanted to, or freely chose to, but because he felt he had to. Like those many who would be less fortunate in England than he was in Ireland, and like those few who prospered and succeeded in their new surroundings as he did in his, Trollope, too, was subject to the dislocations of class society, which sent him to the colonies in search of a career and an identity. In this sense, R. F. Foster’s placement of Trollope among the ‘‘marginal men’’ who traveled from metropolis to colony to find or make themselves in Ireland could not be more apt.⁴ But while Ireland did indeed ‘‘make’’ Trollope, as I will further analyze below, my central concern in this chapter is with what Trollope made of Ireland. For the most important of all the many things that differentiate him from most travelers in the other direction is that he achieved the power to represent himself and others: the authority to narrate that ultimately enabled his return from the Irish periphery to the metropole made him a new man, no longer marginal, but a prime literary purveyor of Englishness. Itself a material product of the imperial traffic between England and Ireland, Trollope’s career provides a para- digmatic example of how Irish colonial space furnishes a field for the making of a singular and particular English identity. And that identity depends in part on its opposition to the group identity forged for the Irish by English observers – Trollope included – both in and out of Ireland. Here I examine some key textual products of the first fifteen years or so of Trollope’s long career as an Irish novelist, the years leading up to and away from the Great Famine, which occupies no less central and vexed a place within his Irish writing than it does in our collective historical memory. After establishing the coordinates for mapping his position as colonial administrator and author, I look at Trollope’s first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, set and written before the famine. The trope of Irish underdevelopment is marked in this text by the Trollope’s Ireland inability of the native Irish to create plots, in several different senses of that word, that would forward their interests; as in the representations of immigrants I have previously discussed, Trollope depicts ‘‘the lower Irish’’ as lacking the capacity for effective political action that distin- guishes the civilian from the barbarian, while he more subtly if strin- gently critiques the colonial Irish ruling class for its failure to rule. By contrast with all the Irish people that The Macdermots of Ballycloran represents, Trollope’s own powers of observation and plot-making are affirmed in the ideological interests of a new wave of colonial reform. His remarks on his salary increase suggest that Trollope accrued econ- omic and literary capital by means of the specific nature of his duties. As ‘‘a ‘deputy inspector’ of country post office books he was to investigate complaints from the public about mail service’’ and ‘‘to arrange delivery to distant locations within his district, which comprised roughly the ancient province of Connaught,’’ perhaps the least modernized or anglicized part of Ireland.⁵ Eventually he traveled all over the four provinces as a postal inspector: serving in each district, riding from town to town checking routes, and carrying out the work of colonial adminis- tration in his everyday contacts with postal employees and customers. His Irish novels are therefore set in locations Trollope came to know well as a result of his labors, represented for the most part with close attention to detail.⁶ Developing what the anthropologist James Clifford calls a ‘‘travel knowledge,’’ one he regarded as comprehensive in scope, Trollope perceived himself as having a minute understanding of the country.⁷ ‘‘I do not think any other officer has local knowledge of the whole district except myself,’’ he told a Select Committee on Postal Arrangements in Ireland which convened in London in : ‘‘I have local knowledge over the whole of Ireland.’’⁸ As an imperial civil servant operating under ‘‘strong cultural, political, and economic compul- sions,’’ Trollope relentlessly turned colonial experience to account; his Irish fiction became a most profitable site for putting this professionally accrued ‘‘knowledge’’ to use.⁹ And in doing so, the writing encodes a very particular position: Mary Hamer characterizes Trollope as one who ‘‘lived and worked in Ireland as the representative of English colonial power,’’ and so produced fictions about Ireland almost as an extension of his administrative labor.¹⁰ If he ‘‘found his identity in the making of commodified novels,’’ as Andrew H. Miller suggests, then he found his most fertile ground for producing both identities and novels in a land that his writing commodifies and colonizes.¹¹  Allegories of Union in Irish and English writing Gauri Viswanathan’s analysis of British identity formation in India provides a way of reading Trollope’s double position in terms of how the acquisition and production of knowledge about an ‘‘other’’ provides a basis for establishing colonial authority and subjectivity. Within the framework she describes, ‘‘the Englishman actively participating in the cruder realities of conquest, commercial aggrandizement, and disciplin- ary management of natives’’ underpins the construction of ‘‘the rarefied, more exalted image of the Englishman as producer of the knowledge that empowers him to conquer, appropriate, and manage in the first place.’’¹² What is somewhat unusual about Trollope’s situation, however, is that he takes up both these positions – administrator and author – at once. We might read the official Trollope, traveling Ireland and amassing administrative ‘‘local knowledge,’’ as authoring the authorial Trollope, who transforms what he acquires into literary cur- rency, and whose representations of Ireland and the Irish justify his (newly achieved) dominance and their subject status. Trollope’s doubled claim to ‘‘know’’ the Irish, derived from his position within Ireland as a colonial functionary and his literary endeavor to represent Ireland in realist fiction, thus works to consolidate his superior status vis-a`-vis the object of knowledge: in this case, Ireland, but perhaps equally true of the many colonized and imperialized lands and peoples he visited in an official capacity and wrote about over the course of his career – Egypt, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. As an administrative and authorial subject, Trollope produces Ireland as a field for inventing Irish and English character alike, by instituting more ‘‘efficient’’ technologies for disseminating the written in his postal work, and by creating print images of his own, marked for export back to the English literary marketplace.¹³ Understood as a site for Trollope’s subjective development, a place where he achieves a position of authority in becoming both colonial administrator and novelist, Ireland also figures within some critical representations of his writing, as in the writing itself, as a site of underdevelopment from which the fledgling author emerges as a fully fledged novelist. Any number of critics, attempting to redress the rela- tive lack of sustained attention to Trollope’s Irish novels, have empha- sized their continuity with the ‘‘mature’’ English fiction; it is by no means uncommon to come across references to his ‘‘Irish apprentice- ship’’ or his ‘‘romance with Ireland.’’¹⁴ The initial product of that ‘‘apprenticeship,’’ The Macdermots, thus garners praise for its effort at the ‘‘harmonising of private and public themes,’’ its bid at ‘‘rendering Trollope’s Ireland private lives emblematic of a whole society’’:¹⁵ its striving to approxi- mate, in other words, the organic shape and complexity of the ‘‘best’’ novels in the ‘‘English’’ tradition. While the critical discourse on Trollope’s Irish fiction locates the colony as a site for authorial development, the fiction itself constructs an image of Irish culture as underdeveloped or (in a term that would have had something of a positive value for Trollope) ‘‘romantic’’ by English standards of modernity. Just as Ireland provides a space in which Trollope himself ‘‘matures,’’ so, too, does it serve to launch his novelistic career, as the place where he finally laid aside his adolescent mental habit of building ‘‘some castle in the air’’ (An Autobiography ) in favor of putting down images of ruined ones on paper. Ireland thus becomes an appropriate point of origin for Trollopian authorship in The Macdermots of Ballycloran in that within the developmental terms that structure colonial understanding, the place itself represents a phase or stage necessary to the development of the author, but one that remains perpetually immature, feminized, and romantic to the authorial/ad- ministrative eye. The novel opens under the ideological sign of realism, with Chapter One entitled ‘‘Ballycloran House as First Seen by the Author,’’ and the narrator assuming a sociological stance not altogether different from that adopted by Kay or Engels in visiting the Manchester slums. It recounts from the life Trollope’s short visit ‘‘to the quiet little village of Drumsna, which is in the province of Connaught, County Leitrim, about  miles W.N.W. of Dublin, on the mail-coach road to Sligo,’’ and what he saw there on a post-prandial walk: ‘‘After proceeding a mile or so, taking two or three turns to look for improvement, I began to perceive evident signs on the part of the road of retrograding into lane-ism . . . Presently the fragments of a bridge presented themselves, but they too were utterly fallen away from their palmy days.’’¹⁶ Visible signs of ruin and ‘‘retrograding,’’ counterpointed by the absence of ‘‘improvement,’’ suggest devolution rather than progress, and prepare us for the lamentable sight of ‘‘a demesne, of a gentleman’s seat, or the place where a gentleman’s seat had been’’ (). To reach it, the narrator must walk beneath a fallen tree, whose ‘‘roots had nearly refixed themselves in their reversed position, showing that the tree had evident- ly been in that fallen state for years’’ (), emblematic of the ‘‘retrograd- ing’’ process he represents. The visible condition of the estate itself goes on to tell ‘‘the usual story . . . of Connaught gentlemen; an extravagant landlord, reckless tenants,  Allegories of Union in Irish and English writing debt, embarrassment, despair, and ruin’’ (), a story that corresponds directly to the history the narrator has yet to learn of the family that once lived there. Far from demonstrating the ‘‘improvement’’ for which he looks in vain – that idealized sign of an industrious English hus- bandry – Ballycloran is a ‘‘ruin’’ and, as such, a ‘‘characteristic speci- men of Irish life’’ (). So Ireland is represented in The Macdermots by contrast with an implicit English ideal, as not just a backward, but an actively devolving place. And the narratorial perspective – from the exactness of its geographical notations to the more general knowingness of its tone – establishes this traveler as a skilled reader of what the ruin means, as someone intimately familiar from eyewitness observation with ‘‘the usual story.’’ Whereas the narrator sees Ballycloran ‘‘six or seven years’’ () after the final events of the novel have taken place, when the estate has fallen into even greater disrepair than it had displayed during the lifetime of the novel’s hero, the ultimate ruin of both the house and its family is implicit in every aspect of their previous history, reminiscent of the way in which Edgeworth presents her similarly fallen family in Castle Rackrent. And again like Edgeworth’s novel, Trollope’s representation of this Irish family is shaped in part by what he interprets as the historical circum- stances of eighteenth-century Ireland; and so the story he tells of the family, like the story the house itself wordlessly tells, obliquely encodes that history. The hero Thady Macdermot’s great-grandfather, ‘‘disdaining to make anything but estated gentlemen’’ of his sons, ‘‘made over in some fictitious manner (for in those days a Roman Catholic could make no legal will) to his eldest, the estate on which he lived; and to the youngest’’ – Thady’s grandfather, also named Thady – ‘‘that of Ballycloran – about six hundred as bad acres as a gentleman might wish to call his own’’ (). Despite the narrator’s parenthetical reference to the penal laws, they are not explicitly construed as a cause of the family’s down- ward spiral; it is not eighteenth-century discrimination that precipitates Macdermot misfortunes, but what Trollope elsewhere terms the ‘‘gen- teel aspirations’’ and ‘‘pride of station’’ that lead Thady’s ancestor to provide his second son with an estate without the means to maintain, increase, or improve it.¹⁷ While Thady’s grandfather ‘‘planned, or- dered, and agreed for a house, such as he thought the descendant of a Connaught Prince might inhabit without disgrace, it was ill-built, half finished, and paid for by long bills’’ (), bills still unpaid sixty years later in young Thady’s lifetime. Thady’s own father, Larry, similarly promo- Trollope’s Ireland tes the fiction of gentility by refusing to marry into rising middle-class money; by the time our Thady reaches manhood, ‘‘brought up to no profession or business’’ (), ‘‘he felt that his family was sinking lower and lower daily; but . . . he knew not what to do’’ (–). I wish not so much to quarrel with the way Trollope represents this ‘‘characteristic specimen of Irish life’’ as to highlight its critique of the Macdermot men, which intertextually recalls Edgeworth’s plotting in Castle Rackrent or Owenson’s account of the Prince of Inismore, even as it signals something distinctive about the narratorial perspective in this novel. Each Macdermot is, in his own way, unseeing or unable to foresee the consequences of the short-sighted actions he takes: Thady’s great-grandfather consults his own pride rather than his son’s circum- stances; Thady’s grandfather builds ‘‘a gentleman’s residence’’ despite his lack of ‘‘ready money,’’ a practice ‘‘so customary in poor Ireland that it but little harassed’’ him (); and Larry Macdermot likewise puts pride before practicality in refusing to marry the daughter of the very man to whom he owes the money that built his grandfather’s house, because she is not of the ‘‘true descent’’ (). Improvident, then, in both senses of that word, the once-regal paternal line that terminates in the last of the Thadys has failed to improve itself and so has retrograded; little wonder that young Thady ‘‘knew not what to do,’’ since there is nothing that can undo what has been done or, rather, left undone. Unlike the prototypical ‘‘good’’ Anglo-Irish landlord of Edgeworth’s fiction, but like the last of her Rackrents, Trollope’s old catholic Irish can make no plans, produce no schemes for improvement. The Macdermots’ hered- itary improvidence cripples their final heir, for as Keegan, the agent of Larry’s major creditor, points out to Thady, ‘‘it’s quite impossible that the estate should ever come to you’’ (), encumbered as Ballycloran is with unpaid debts. The narrator’s all-seeing omniscience is thus established from the earliest scenes of the novel in contrast to the absence of foresight among the Macdermot men. While the narrator can read their history from the condition of their estate in the present, the characters Trollope invents lack the perspicacity to recognize that past acts have consequences or to shape the course of events to come by formulating a plan of action. Even the fact that Thady ‘‘is the only hero in all of Trollope’s novels who is neither loved by a woman nor falls in love’’ obliquely bespeaks Trol- lope’s point: the novel cannot project the generative future for the Macdermots that a marriage-and-family plot embodies, because they are represented as having already squandered away the means to that  Allegories of Union in Irish and English writing future in the past.¹⁸ Plot-making in the novel, then, is predicated on an ability to see behind and ahead that the narrator alone possesses. And this feature marks a constitutive divide in Trollope’s Irish fiction: be- tween those who can and cannot successfully plot. Judged in this light, perhaps the most significant cultural work that Trollope’s Irish writing accomplishes, as part of a larger discursive project devoted to moderniz- ing and rationalizing Ireland, lies in its representation of this ideological English vision as truth: buttressed by the authority of science and political economy, realist narrative at mid-century takes pride of place amongst the diverse discursive forms that defined and established the truth about ‘‘others’’ for those who produced and consumed it. In a chapter near the end of the first edition of The Macdermots, the lawyer O’Malley lays out the manslaughter defense that he will present at the trial of Thady Macdermot for the murder of Myles Ussher.¹⁹ While Thady did indeed kill Ussher, a protestant policeman, he did so not for political reasons, and not with any degree of premeditation; we readers know that Thady had struck Ussher in a moment of passion, upon finding his sister Feemy unconscious in Ussher’s arms and wrongly concluding from what he had seen that she was about to be carried off against her will. Complicating O’Malley’s defense of Thady is the hero’s tangential involvement with a group of local Ribbonmen, a secret society of catholic tenants who have sworn vengeance on Ussher for his vigorous enforcement of the laws against whiskey-making; while not himself actually a Ribbonman, Thady has gained the appearance of impropriety in associating with them, for he has been among them when they threatened Ussher’s life. With the circumstantial evidence against Thady, O’Malley fears that just this semblance of a conspirator- ial plot will be enough to convict his client. While the lawyer himself has ‘‘no doubt that there was no real connection between [Thady’s] joining that meeting, an illegal act in itself, and the death of [Ussher]’’ (), he knows that he will have a hard time convincing the jury of the same. The political overtones of the murder are much heightened by the fact that Thady himself is not a tenant farmer, but a landlord charged with upholding the authority of a class of which he, in actuality, is only a nominal member. As the prosecutor somewhat misleadingly puts it to the jury of landed gentle- men at the trial, ‘‘the prisoner is from that rank in life to which the greatest number of yourselves belong; and you cannot but see that the fact of his being so, greatly increases the magnitude of his presumed Trollope’s Ireland crime’’ () in murdering one of the King’s sworn servants, stationed in Ireland to protect property and its possessors. A rare catholic landlord within the predominantly protestant group, Thady is assumed to side politically with his catholic tenants against the interests of his fellow landowners. But just as importantly, Thady’s estate is so overburdened with debt, as described above, that he is almost as poor as his poorest tenant. Although Thady is therefore doubly estranged from the local arm of the ascendancy by his religious and economic status, he is yet judged to have undermined its authority from within. The unprovable mitigating circumstances of Ussher’s death, ‘‘joined to [Thady’s] own criminal conduct’’ in associating with the Ribbonmen – which make him, even in O’Malley’s view, ‘‘guilty as a man; but doubly guilty as a landlord’’ () – deem it likely that the murder will be interpreted as a political act. At the trial, Trollope constructs O’Malley’s only conceivable defense as a matter of detaching the (false) politicized reading of Thady’s act from the (true) personal and private meaning of it: ‘‘it is the two combined together which will render the fight so desperate . . . we must separate the two circumstances, which the other party will use all their efforts to unite – we must shew that at any rate no definite preconcerted plan has been proved to have been arranged’’ (). The defense must, then, demonstrate that Thady never entered into a political conspiracy with the Ribbonmen to commit murder; that there is as such no double motive, no connection between the political consciousness (falsely) at- tributed to Thady and his private quarrel with Ussher; and, moreover, that ‘‘no definite preconcerted plan’’ – no plot of any kind – was conceived before, or executed by Thady at, the moment of the murder. And the defense fails because Feemy, the only other person present at the scene of the crime, dies (along with her unborn child) before she can be forced to testify in her brother’s behalf. Thereafter, as Robert Tracy argues, ‘‘Thady is executed because most of the local Anglo-Irish gentry and the authorities consider the murder of Ussher a political crime, an act of rebellion against British rule,’’ and ‘‘because he can be made to look like an Irish political assassin rather than a man defending his sister’s honour.’’²⁰ Although Trollope painstakingly depicts the murder for his readers as a spontaneous crime of passion, the jury ineluctably reads it as the outcome of a calculated plot. The narrative thus makes it clear that no matter what has taken place, or why, the local authorities – the novel’s most powerful internal audience – can interpret the event only as a political conspiracy. But in  Allegories of Union in Irish and English writing representing Thady’s act to us as unpremeditated, the narrator calls into question both the interpretive frame that members of the jury deploy as well as the capacity of the Irish to plan and execute a successful conspiracy: like Engels’s or Kingsley’s Irish in England, Trollope’s Irish at home are represented as characterologically lacking in this important skill, even as they are endlessly suspected of conspiratorial tendencies. The narrative framing of both the murder and its prosecution casts all those concerned, with the possible exception of the lawyer O’Malley, as in some way deficient or erring as interpreters or actors. For if those gentlemen who judge and convict Thady and his catholic tenants are mired in a panic that prevents them from perceiving that there is no real plot to perceive, then the putative political assassins are shown as too caught up in their private grievances even to spin an efficacious plot. While Thady does not plan to kill Ussher, the plotlessness of his actions cannot prevent that from happening any more than it can save him from losing his own life on the scaffold; indeed, it is precisely the improvidence of Thady’s actions that provides the mainspring of Trol- lope’s own design in the novel. As a legal reader of the extraordinarily tangled plot Trollope has woven in The Macdermots, O’Malley attempts to ‘‘separate the two circumstances’’ that will lead to Thady’s convic- tion: but O’Malley’s effort cannot succeed lest it undermine the air of uncontrollable inevitability that Trollope has assigned to Thady’s fate – and by extension, to Ireland’s – from the earliest pages of the novel. Whereas Thady is presented as innocent by reason of extenuating circumstances, both his innocence and the narrator’s support of him rest on his complete incapacity for conceiving and carrying out any plan that might issue in an effective result or outcome; if all catholic men are to some extent understood as potential conspirators by the men of the jury, from the narrator’s point of view they are shown to lack the ability to conspire. Like that of the culture in which he lives, then, Thady’s story – along with the very means for producing and interpreting it – is entirely out of his own control. Progress, intention, and improvement are specifically denied to the Macdermots and the devolving rural world in which they live. Even their crimes against authority issue from nothing that remotely approaches a plot. In both of the narrative lines that Trollope constructs – Feemy’s seduction by Ussher and the local events that lead up to Ussher’s death – Thady’s lack of authority accounts for his inaction. The social position he ostensibly occupies – as a landowner, an heir, an only son, and a brother – accords him responsibility without power, subjected as he is to Trollope’s Ireland [...]... political and narrative authority central to The Macdermots.³⁰ As in the fiction I have already examined, the colonial Trollope’s Ireland  administrator here, too, promotes the need for rehabilitating English authority in Ireland; for example, Trollope characterizes the ‘‘lamentations’’ of those who criticize the British government as ‘‘most injurious’’ (‘‘Letters’’ ) to colonial authority, and instead... downplays the possibility of native Irish resistance to colonial Trollope’s Ireland  rule, even as he makes the inculcation of good English virtues the prime mover of the post-famine plot Yet the fact that there is a threat to English legitimacy in the novel, even a false one, suggests Trollope’s ongoing consciousness of the problem within colonial authority that he had identified in The Macdermots, a... mismanagement and promote the production of a post-famine Ireland conducted along ‘‘progressive’’ new lines, based not on misrepresentation and misunderstanding, but on ‘‘a well-grounded hope’’ () – grounded, that is, on Trollope’s first-hand knowledge and disinterested vision, his grasp of facts which he presents as simply incontestable by any right-minded or experienced observer Perhaps the best... enough from the context of his argument in the letters that he envisioned something like a revived system of colonial plantation in post-famine Ireland, which would draw clearer lines of class and culture between landed English capital and landless Irish labor But Trollope’s vision of the post-famine future was also partially realized in fiction ‘‘The man who takes a farm in Ireland and lives on it is... absence of authority common to both As I will argue below, Trollope does link the scandal of Feemy’s fall with the local resistance to Ussher by attributing them to a lack of (masculine) colonial authority, which would keep women and peasants in line Thus the familial plot does not so much allegorize the political one (a la Edgeworth or Owenson) as ` point to an underlying problem of failed authority. .. Metonymically, then, Trollope connects the absence of one with the presence of the other, suggesting that the lack of effective colonial authority in the person of a resident patriarch gives rise to the Ribbonmen’s challenge, however ineffectual, against such pale and corrupted reflections of that authority as Ussher and Keegan.²⁵ While the novel represents the local ascendancy as overreacting to the phantom political... govern, nor their subjects, who are incapable of forging an effective conspiracy plot, escapes Trollope’s critique Like the sexual scandal surrounding Feemy, the political scandal of the Ribbonmen points directly to the absence of (English) patriarchal control; Trollope thus installs the need for reconstituting colonial authority at the very heart of his first (Irish) fiction.²⁸ Completed in July , but not... novel’s seduction plot as a gendered allegory of English–Irish colonial relations, suggesting most generally, in Michael Cotsell’s words, that ‘‘an unspoken analogy with the relations of cultures and nations underlies [Trollope’s] accounts of romance.’’²¹ A conventional representation of Ireland as fallen and feminine signifies an imbalance of colonial power More particularly, Conor Johnston argues that... injurious’’ (‘‘Letters’’ ) to colonial authority, and instead defends official practices and policies From the administrative point of view Trollope adopts in these letters, establishing colonial authority as above reproach in the post-famine future would require that all ineffective native elements, be they rulers or ruled, standing in the way of ‘‘progress’’ be removed Rewriting the famine as, in this respect,... As interpreted for us by Trollope’s narrator, Thady’s inability to take up an appropriately authoritative stance toward his querulous father and his erring sister, overdetermined by family history, is of a piece with his subsequent responses Feemy’s seduction and betrayal by Ussher may be read, then, as symptomatic of the absence of effective masculine authority; as in the class-driven plots of many analogous .   Plotting colonial authority: Trollope’s Ireland, – In taking up his position for the. from the first, his employment as a traveling colonial administrator was intertwined with his work as a novelist-to-be. By contrast with the previous one, this