Review: Dr. Wortle's School

Dr. Wortle's School by Anthony Trollope
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I'm a big Trollope fan. I think the Warden is one of the great works of the Victorian era (or, really, any era), and I have enjoyed some of the bigger ones like Barchester Towers and The Eustace Diamonds a lot. So, as part of my first trip to London, I thought I'd try a new one.

I'd always understood that Trollope is eerily consistent, that just as he sat down and wrote every day, he also maintained a consistent level of excellence throughout his career. This one is very late, though, and all I can think to say about it is that it's Trollope jumping the shark.

For starters, there's something formulaic about this. We get a romance as a secondary plot, but it feels like a fill-in-the-blank exercise. Our sort-of protagonist, Dr. Wortle, has a daughter who's not only pure but blandly obedient. When her "lover" expresses interest in her, all she can think to say is that she's never thought of him in that way. She's a perfect Victorian type -- outside of playing tennis with the young man, she's shown him no interest and merely waited to be acted upon. There's no spark at all to their "affair"; instead, it just seems to fill space in a largely empty novel.

I gave it a shot in the first place because the introduction by John Halperin insisted that it creates and explores a profound ethical situation: what happens when an individual suspects that the majority of people in a culture are wrong in their certainty that someone else is at fault. (I also gave it a shot for its great opening line, "The Rev. Jeffrey Wortle, D.D., was a man much esteemed by others, -- and by himself.")

The trouble is, there's nothing unsubtle about that situation. Dr. Wortle's assistant head of school, Mr. Peacock, has accidentally married a woman whose husband may be alive. Or he may be dead. In any case, Peacock has acted only in entirely above board ways. He's never set out to deceive anyone, and his offense -- marrying a woman whose first husband was a drunk and who abandoned her -- seems not merely dated but a strawman crime as well.

It's an undramatic dramatic setting and then, to compound all the other narrative sins, it spends much of the second half with Mr. Peacock traversing the United States to find the proof he needs of his wife's ex-husband's death. Trollope is good -- at his best he's one of the all-time greats -- but he has no conception of how to describe an American cowboy. Imagine, for instance, Mr. Peacock finding himself in a near knife fight; it's like Downton Abbey working in a brief mafia plot.

There are still some wonderful flashes of verbal economy, sentences like that first one that capture a top-notch mind in the midst of moving a story forward, but the overall structure here falls two or three full notches below Trollope at his best.

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