Autobiography of Anthony Trollope - Anthony Trollope

write nothing. A plan was formed for extending the rural delivery

of letters, and for adjusting the work, which up to that time had

been done in a very irregular manner. A country letter-carrier

would be sent in one direction in which there were but few letters

to be delivered, the arrangement having originated probably at

the request of some influential person, while in another direction

there was no letter-carrier because no influential person had exerted

himself. It was intended to set this right throughout England,

Ireland, and Scotland; and I quickly did the work in the Irish

district to which I was attached. I was then invited to do the same

in a portion of England, and I spent two of the happiest years of

my life at the task. I began in Devonshire; and visited, I think

I may say, every nook in that county, in Cornwall, Somersetshire,

the greater part of Dorsetshire, the Channel Islands, part of

Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire,

Monmouthshire, and the six southern Welsh counties. In this way I

had an opportunity of seeing a considerable portion of Great Britain,

with a minuteness which few have enjoyed. And I did my business

after a fashion in which no other official man has worked at

least for many years. I went almost everywhere on horseback. I had

two hunters of my own, and here and there, where I could, I hired

a third horse. I had an Irish groom with me,--an old man, who has

now been in my service for thirty-five years; and in this manner I

saw almost every house--I think I may say every house of importance--in

this large district. The object was to create a postal network

which should catch all recipients of letters. In France it was, and

I suppose still is, the practice to deliver every letter. Wherever

the man may live to whom a letter is addressed, it is the duty of

some letter-carrier to take that letter to his house, sooner or

later. But this, of course, must be done slowly. With us a delivery

much delayed was thought to be worse than none at all. In some places

we did establish posts three times a week, and perhaps occasionally

twice a week; but such halting arrangements were considered to

be objectionable, and we were bound down by a salutary law as to

expense, which came from our masters at the Treasury. We were not

allowed to establish any messenger's walk on which a sufficient

number of letters would not be delivered to pay the man's wages,

counted at a halfpenny a letter. But then the counting was in our

own hands, and an enterprising official might be sanguine in his

figures. I think I was sanguine. I did not prepare false accounts;

but I fear that the postmasters and clerks who absolutely had the

country to do became aware that I was anxious for good results.

It is amusing to watch how a passion will grow upon a man. During

those two years it was the ambition of my life to cover the country

with rural letter-carriers. I do not remember that in any case a

rural post proposed by me was negatived by the authorities; but I

fear that some of them broke down afterwards as being too poor, or

because, in my anxiety to include this house and that, I had sent

the men too far afield. Our law was that a man should not be required

to walk more than sixteen miles a day. Had the work to be done been

all on a measured road, there would have been no need for doubt as

to the distances. But my letter-carriers went here and there across

the fields. It was my special delight to take them by all short

cuts; and as I measured on horseback the short cuts which they would

have to make on foot, perhaps I was sometimes a little unjust to

them.

All this I did on horseback, riding on an average forty miles a

day. I was paid sixpence a mile for the distance travelled, and it

was necessary that I should at any rate travel enough to pay for

my equipage. This I did, and got my hunting out of it also. I have

often surprised some small country postmaster, who had never seen

or heard of me before, by coming down upon him at nine in the

morning, with a red coat and boots and breeches, and interrogating

him as to the disposal of every letter which came into his office.

And in the same guise I would ride up to farmhouses, or parsonages,

or other lone residences about the country, and ask the people how

they got their letters, at what hour, and especially whether they

were delivered free or at a certain charge. For a habit had crept

into use, which came to be, in my eyes, at that time, the one sin

for which there was no pardon, in accordance with which these rural

letter-carriers used to charge a penny a letter, alleging that the

house was out of their beat, and that they must be paid for their

extra work. I think that I did stamp out that evil. In all these

visits I was, in truth, a beneficent angel to the public, bringing

everywhere with me an earlier, cheaper, and much more regular delivery

of letters. But not unfrequently the angelic nature of my mission

was imperfectly understood. I was perhaps a little in a hurry to

get on, and did not allow as much time as was necessary to explain

to the wondering mistress of the house, or to an open-mouthed farmer,

why it was that a man arrayed for hunting asked so many questions

which might be considered impertinent, as applying to his or her

private affairs. "Good-morning, sir. I have just called to ask a

few questions. I am a surveyor of the Post Office. How do you get

your letters? As I am a little in a hurry, perhaps you can explain

at once." Then I would take out my pencil and notebook, and wait

for information. And in fact there was no other way in which the

truth could be ascertained. Unless I came down suddenly as a summer's

storm upon them, the very people who were robbed by our messengers

would not confess the robbery, fearing the ill-will of the men. It

was necessary to startle them into the revelations which I required

them to make for their own good. And I did startle them. I became

thoroughly used to it, and soon lost my native bashfulness;--but

sometimes my visits astonished the retiring inhabitants of country

houses. I did, however, do my work, and can look back upon what I

did with thorough satisfaction. I was altogether in earnest; and

I believe that many a farmer now has his letters brought daily to

his house free of charge, who but for me would still have had to

send to the post-town for them twice a week, or to have paid a man

for bringing them irregularly to his door.

This work took up my time so completely, and entailed upon me so

great an amount of writing, that I was in fact unable to do any

literary work. From day to day I thought of it, still purporting

to make another effort, and often turning over in my head some

fragment of a plot which had occurred to me. But the day did not

come in which I could sit down with my pen and paper and begin

another novel. For, after all, what could it be but a novel? The

play had failed more absolutely than the novels, for the novels

had attained the honour of print. The cause of this pressure of

official work lay, not in the demands of the General Post Office,

which more than once expressed itself as astonished by my celerity,

but in the necessity which was incumbent on me to travel miles

enough to pay for my horses, and upon the amount of correspondence,

returns, figures, and reports which such an amount of daily travelling

brought with it. I may boast that the work was done very quickly

and very thoroughly,--with no fault but an over-eagerness to extend

postal arrangements far and wide.

In the course of the job I visited Salisbury, and whilst wandering

there one mid-summer evening round the purlieus of the cathedral I

conceived the story of The Warden,--from whence came that series of

novels of which Barchester, with its bishops, deans, and archdeacon,

was the central site. I may as well declare at once that no one

at their commencement could have had less reason than myself to

presume himself to be able to write about clergymen. I have been

often asked in what period of my early life I had lived so long

in a cathedral city as to have become intimate with the ways of a

Close. I never lived in any cathedral city,--except London, never

knew anything of any Close, and at that time had enjoyed no peculiar

intimacy with any clergyman. My archdeacon, who has been said to be

life-like, and for whom I confess that I have all a parent's fond

affection, was, I think, the simple result of an effort of my moral

consciousness. It was such as that, in my opinion, that an archdeacon

should be,--or, at any rate, would be with such advantages as

an archdeacon might have; and lo! an archdeacon was produced, who

has been declared by competent authorities to be a real archdeacon

down to the very ground. And yet, as far as I can remember, I had

not then even spoken to an archdeacon. I have felt the compliment

to be very great. The archdeacon came whole from my brain after

this fashion;--but in writing about clergymen generally, I had to

pick up as I went whatever I might know or pretend to know about

them. But my first idea had no reference to clergymen in general.

I had been struck by two opposite evils,--or what seemed to me to

be evils,--and with an absence of all art-judgment in such matters, I

thought that I might be able to expose them, or rather to describe

them, both in one and the same tale. The first evil was the

possession by the Church of certain funds and endowments which had

been intended for charitable purposes, but which had been allowed

to become incomes for idle Church dignitaries. There had been more

than one such case brought to public notice at the time, in which

there seemed to have been an egregious malversation of charitable

purposes. The second evil was its very opposite. Though I had been

much struck by the injustice above described, I had also often

been angered by the undeserved severity of the newspapers towards

the recipients of such incomes, who could hardly be considered

to be the chief sinners in the matter. When a man is appointed to

a place, it is natural that he should accept the income allotted

to that place without much inquiry. It is seldom that he will be

the first to find out that his services are overpaid. Though he be

called upon only to look beautiful and to be dignified upon State

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