By 1860, however, Trollope had achieved a unique position as at once the founder and producer of fiction as a serious profession, which, followed a certain number of hours daily, cannot fail of yielding an annual income. The habit of, in his own phrase, exacting from himself so many words at a sitting could not but be unfavourable to excellence of execution, though it interfered marvellously little, if at all, with his variety and versatility. Those gifts, during 1867-8, he had exhibited in taking his readers from the familiar home scenes to the less known corners of continental Europe. Here his work, though passing muster sufficiently well with the public, did not promise the material success which he knew he could still command in other fields. Consequently, before venturing on the experiment to be recorded in the next chapter, he returned to the Barchester vein with the certainty, soon realised, of convincing publishers and public that it still contained ore not less valuable and pleasant than he had last drawn from it a decade ago. The extracts given at the close of the present chapter will show that from reviewers’ and booksellers’ point of view Trollope might well applaud himself on the reception of _Rachel Ray_. Nevertheless it was a novelist’s business to create. In _Rachel Ray_, he soon became conscious, to quote his own words to the present writer, of having set up certain religious or quasi-religious images chiefly, he admitted, for the purpose of belabouring them with verbal blows even as in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ Quilp vents his hatred on Christopher Nubbles in attacks on the wooden figure to which he gives Kit’s name.
Nearly half a generation has passed since, during the eventful ramble, already described in its proper place, round Salisbury Close, there had occurred to him the earliest of those ecclesiastical varieties whose portraiture amid their domestic or social surroundings soon brought him fortune and fame. Before closing the gallery of these sketches, he would draw one more clergyman of the same honest, manly English type as Mark Robarts, and would show his readiness to recognise elevation of character and purity of soul when, if possible, existing in an ordained minister of the gospel of views as decidedly Low Church as the detested Mr. Prong himself. This latter purpose was accomplished by _The Last Chronicle of Barset_ (1867). Nothing could be more dramatically complete than the contrast presented to the sleek, luxurious divines, or the well-fed, well-clothed, muscular officials of the church militant, in whom the novelist delighted, than the austere, gaunt, ill-nourished, poverty-stricken perpetual curate of Hogglestock in the marsh. The chronic gloom of his constitutional melancholy is deepened and saddened by the sombre Calvinism of a creed that admits or asks no ray of relief for the hardship of a lot still representing, with not less of faithful cruelty than when Trollope wrote, the hard lives of so many among the most spiritually-minded, most industrious, and not the least well-educated of the country clergy. The Rev. Josiah Crawley’s great qualities, his concealed accomplishments, and his shrinking silent heroism, have won the admiration of the academic, highly-cultivated, and well-to-do Dean Arabin, who has married Mr. Harding’s favourite, youngest daughter Eleanor. This friendship of the prosperous Anglican official for the half-starved incumbent gives rise to the chief and only sensational episode of the book, at once revealing, as well as altogether caused by, Crawley’s utter lack of all business methods, forgetfulness of facts, and heedlessness of consequences. Nor, in these respects, is the daughter of Crawley’s old friend, the Warden, formerly the rich widow, Mrs. Bold, and now Mrs. Arabin, in all matters having to do with money much better.