Going to Ireland as a bachelor, Anthony Trollope had been naturally expected, by the public opinion of the localities where he became known, to find a wife among its residents. It was indeed on Irish soil, at a well-known seaside resort, that he first met the lady to whom he in 1842 became engaged, and who in 1844 took his name. Her home, however, was in Yorkshire, at Rotherham, near Sheffield, where her father, Mr. Heseltine, had the management of a bank. With his marriage closes the earliest instalment of Anthony Trollope’s Irish experiences. He had begun his abode in the country as a man entirely unknown except to the few who had heard of his mother’s books. That did not always prove a recommendation, for from the day of her having found, as was said, in the Harrow clergyman named Cunningham, the Vicar of Wrexhill’s original, Mrs. Trollope had been charged with putting her friends or enemies into her stories. To such an extent was this supposed to be the case that when, several years afterwards, Charles Lever was thrown into her society at Florence, he markedly avoided her, whether as a partner at a whist-table or a next-door neighbour at dinner. Anthony Trollope’s friendship therefore with Lever, so far from originating in his acquaintance with Mrs. Trollope, would have been rather hindered by it, and was indeed a very gradual growth that had not reached maturity even when Trollope’s novels had become at least as popular as those of Lever himself.
But, during the earlier years of his long sojourn amongst them, the Irish classes and masses knew Trollope, not as a writer, but as the impersonation of the severest officialism. Not having gone to a University after school, nor even since his school-days having had time to move in society and assimilate its easier ways, he long combined much of youthful crudity with civilian stiffness. He had, in fact, unconsciously formed his manner upon that of the men who were around him and above him at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. As a companion and conversationalist he lacked the lightness of touch, the elasticity and ease communicated to each other by young men of his station in life, at college, at the club, or in the companionship of travel. At Harrow, none of his school-fellows had done him a better turn than William Gregory, his later friend of Coole Park, by disposing of a rumour, which local invention had not been slow to embroider with more sinister legends, that Trollope’s father was an outlaw. Hence, of course, the discreditable appearance of the boy himself. What an outlaw meant, none of them exactly knew. But the word had an evil sound. Doubtless the person whom it indicated must, by certain misdemeanours, have made himself the enemy of his species. This is the kind of defamatory gossip which pursues its victim long after the incidents that have given rise to the lie are forgotten. Gregory therefore sometimes found occasion for repeating to his Connaught neighbours the contradiction by which he had so signally served his friend at school.