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umbello are honeymooning in Rome. Mrs Proudie’s daughter Olivia, marrying a mere curate, can only afford a wedding tour to Malvern. n Barchester Towers, an earlier novel in the same series, the Proudies’ provincialism is given a salutary jolt by the return from butterfly-hunting on Lake Como of the absentee canon Dr Vesey Stanhope, accompanied by his raffish but distinctly engaging family. The Stanhopes, Trollope tells us, are the sort of people who ‘would visit you in your sickness (provided it were not contagious), would bring you oranges, French novels, and the last new bit of scandal, and then hear of your death or your recovery with an equally indifferent composure’. That allusion to ‘French novels’ is a giveaway – the unnamed prime minister who has recently appointed Dr Proudie to the see of Barchester is shown doing so while ‘conning over a Newmarket list’ with ‘an uncut French novel at his elbow’. The word ‘French’ is Victorian code for ‘sex’, thus the Stanhopes are damned before they even set foot in Barchester. Yet what fun they all are and how Trollope clearly delights in them, ready to jolly up stuffy old Barchester: the doctor who ‘had forgiven everything – except inattention to his dinner’; Mrs Stanhope, who never gets up till mid-afternoon – ‘The far niente of her Italian life had entered into her very soul and brought her to regard a state of inactivity as the only earthly good’; free-thinking Charlotte, 94
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subtle corruptor of her entire family; Bertie with his blue eyes and blue suit, dabbling in Judaism, sculpture and ‘making love to ladies’; the unforgettable Madeline (the very name, however lacking the extra ‘e’, indicates that she might have been happier in a French novel), a siren Signora on her sofa, perpetual casualty of something nasty, carefully unspecified, done to her by her Italian husband, ‘a mere captain in the pope’s guard’. For many who went to live abroad like the Stanhopes, travel became a species of mortgage designed to secure at least a pledge of immortality, and to cater for these a new kind of guidebook sprang up. This was the specialist vade mecum aimed at those with particular reasons to shun the northern climate, a guide which sold the Mediterranean as an extensive sanatorium, a marine spa, rather than a cradle of ancient civilizations. The archetype of such books is Dr Eustace Reynolds-Ball’s bestseller Mediterranean Winter Resorts, a compact two-part work first published in 1908, reaching seven editions by 1914 and known as ‘the invalid’s Baedeker’. Reynolds-Ball’s priorities are firmly established in his opening chapter on the French Riviera. He devotes five pages to rainfall, mean temperatures and the drawbacks of the mistral before analysing the various resorts on the basis of geographical position, sanitary arrangements and suitability in the treatment of diseases. Hyères, for example, favoured by Queen Victoria, 95

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umbello are honeymooning in Rome. Mrs Proudie’s daughter Olivia, marrying a mere curate, can only afford a wedding tour to Malvern.

n Barchester Towers, an earlier novel in the same series, the Proudies’ provincialism is given a salutary jolt by the return from butterfly-hunting on Lake Como of the absentee canon Dr Vesey Stanhope, accompanied by his raffish but distinctly engaging family. The Stanhopes, Trollope tells us, are the sort of people who ‘would visit you in your sickness (provided it were not contagious), would bring you oranges, French novels, and the last new bit of scandal, and then hear of your death or your recovery with an equally indifferent composure’. That allusion to ‘French novels’ is a giveaway – the unnamed prime minister who has recently appointed Dr Proudie to the see of Barchester is shown doing so while ‘conning over a Newmarket list’ with ‘an uncut French novel at his elbow’. The word ‘French’ is Victorian code for ‘sex’, thus the Stanhopes are damned before they even set foot in Barchester.

Yet what fun they all are and how Trollope clearly delights in them, ready to jolly up stuffy old Barchester: the doctor who ‘had forgiven everything – except inattention to his dinner’; Mrs Stanhope, who never gets up till mid-afternoon – ‘The far niente of her Italian life had entered into her very soul and brought her to regard a state of inactivity as the only earthly good’; free-thinking Charlotte,

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