Monday, January 31, 2011

The Pallisers

The Pallisers (1974) is a revered BBC adaptation from the early 1970s, the era of other classic series such as The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970) and Elizabeth R (1971). It is based on the six Palliser novels (1864 - 1879) of Anthony Trollope, plus an episode from his The Small House At Allington (1864).

Trollope's Palliser novels are a rich, complex portrait of high-Victorian politics and society as seen through the intertwining lives of an ever-shifting ensemble of characters. Chief among them are Plantagenet Palliser, a rising politician and heir to the Duke of Omnium; Lady Glencora, who reluctantly agrees to an arranged marriage with Palliser, but who loves another man, Burgo Fitzgerald; and Phineas Finn, a naïve and idealistic young man who over the course of two of the novels undergoes a political and sentimental education.

We've just finished reading (aloud!) the first novel in the series, Can You Forgive Her?, and thought that we'd enjoy Simon Raven's highly-regarded 26-part BBC series. After all, we love the BBC adaptations of George Eliot's Middlemarch (1994) and of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1995) and Persuasion (1995).

But almost immediately The Pallisers goes wrong—horribly wrong. Our first surprise was that, like Elizabeth R and The Six Wives of Henry VIII, it was shot on video, which makes even the gorgeous settings and costumes look flat and cheap. But that would be a minor annoyance if the casting and Raven's script weren't so badly off.

Trollope writes of Plantagenet Palliser at his first appearance in The Small House At Allington: "He was about five-and-twenty years of age...dressed very quietly, never changing the colour or form of his garments; and in society was quiet, reserved, and very often silent. He was tall, slight, and not ill-looking..." [1] His youth is highly significant; one of the recurring issues in Can You Forgive Her? is Palliser's relative inexperience in comparison to the other men of power with whom he is vying for the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Unfortunately the actor portraying him, Philip Latham, was 45 at the time the series was filmed, and if anything looks older. This is just one example of the persistent miscasting in The Pallisers.

The episode from The Small House At Allington that is included in the first episode of the series is Plantagenet's flirtation with the married Lady Dumbello. She is very beautiful and (thanks to her marriage) very rich, but, as her name might suggest, not especially vivacious or witty. One of Trollope's jokes is that these two "reserved" and "undemonstrative" people, who can hardly bring themselves to utter more than a few polite banalities to each other, apparently contemplate having an affair.

However, in the extended opening scene of The Pallisers, a garden party, Palliser and Lady Dumbello are hardly reserved or undemonstrative. We see them move away together from the rest of the guests and, in a shaded nook, speak animatedly to each other about the financial issues facing the nation (a subject about which Trollope's Lady Dumbello would be unlikely—or unable—to carry on a conversation). Here there's another error of casting, or direction. Lady Dumbello is portrayed with a very thick upper-class accent (so clipped and mumbled we could hardly understand what she was saying). In Trollope's novel, however, before she became Lady Dumbello she was Griselda Grantly, the daughter of a country priest—someone unlikely to have such an upper-crust accent. In fact, perhaps it is Lady Dumbello's anxiety about revealing her middle-class origins that makes her so reticent in company. Trollope also writes that "she was a lady still very young, having as yet been little more than two years married." [2] So Lady Dumbello is likely to be in her early 20s; Rachel Herbert, the actress who portrays her, looks to be in her mid-30s, and (not to be unkind) does not have the sort of looks that would have all of society competing for her favor, as does Trollope's Lady Dumbello.

Yet another example of miscasting: Lady Glencora M'Cluskie "has only been out a few months," as we are told by one of the characters in The Pallisers, placing her in her late teens. The actress portraying her, Susan Hampshire, was 37, and even though she looks younger than her age is still far too old. Plus, Raven has her behaving far too brazenly with her swain Burgo Fitzgerald. Lady Glencora is flirtatious, but would hardly kiss her partner openly on the dance floor before all her family and acquaintances—no young woman of her class, situation and era would.

As for Burgo Fitzgerald: "He was one of those young men with dark hair and blue eyes,—who wear no beard, and are certainly among the handsomest of all God's creatures. No more handsome man than Burgo Fitzgerald lived in his days; and this merit at any rate was his,—that he thought nothing of his own beauty." [3] Barry Justice, who plays Burgo, has light brown hair and brown eyes. I mean no disrespect, and I am not the most reliable judge of men's looks, but I would not say that no more handsome man than Barry Justice lived in his days, even if those days were the mid-70s. (You can judge for yourself to the right; images "borrowed" from Ellen and Jim Have a Blog Too.)

The travesty continues: George Vavasor is not only (of course!) too old (Trollope says that he is "a year or two over thirty," while the actor Gary Watson looks to be well over forty)—he has no facial scar! Trollope: "one side of his face been dreadfully scarred by a cicatrice, which in healing, had left a dark indented line down from his left eye to his lower jaw. That black ravine running through his cheek was certainly ugly. On some occasions, when he was angry or disappointed, it was very hideous; for he would so contort his face that the scar would, as it were, stretch itself out, revealing all its horrors, and his countenance would become all scar." [4]

Finally, there's Dolly Longestaffe, a man apparently in late middle age who rather too explicitly explains all the Palliser characters and their connections to George Vavasor (and, of course, to us—he's a bit too obviously the screenwriter's stand-in). The only problem is that Dolly Longestaffe is not even a character in the first five Palliser novels. He doesn't appear until the final book, The Duke's Children (1879), after being introduced in the (non-Palliser) The Way We Live Now (1875). In The Way We Live Now Dolly is a frivolous man who is somewhere between his late twenties and mid-thirties; if the action in the first episode of The Pallisers is taking place ten years earlier, Dolly is twice as old as he should be (the actor Donald Pickering was in his forties, and is made up to look even older).

All this occurs in the first ten minutes of the first episode! Alas, that is all of that episode, or of any episode of The Pallisers, that we will ever see. Those who report enjoying the series must either have never read Trollope, or are better able than we are to block out what they remember of the books. Instead, we'll be returning to the pleasures of Trollope's writing, read aloud.

Update 3 Feb 2011: The Duke's garden party, which I had assumed was an invention of The Pallisers screenwriter Simon Raven, is based on an important scene in Trollope—but one that occurs towards the end of the second Palliser novel, Phineas Finn (1867). It's a brilliant scene, in which the rising politician Phineas Finn encounters in turn each of the three women (the unhappily married Lady Laura Kennedy, the unhappily engaged Violet Effingham, and the unhappily dis-engaged Madame Max Goesler) who represent his past, present, and future marital aspirations.

But Raven almost throws away this scene. He uses it as a means of introducing several of the major characters, and it is a spectacular set-piece. But because the characters have not yet been laboriously explained to us by Dolly Longestaffe, their actions and relationships don't yet carry any emotional weight. It's another missed opportunity; the scene would have been far more effective in its true place in the saga.

Update 26 May 2012: You can read more of my thoughts on Trollope's Palliser novels in my post A guide to the novels of Anthony Trollope, Part 2: The Palliser novels.



1. The Small House At Allington, Ch. XXIII.
2. The Small House At Allington, Ch. XVII.
3. Can You Forgive Her?, Ch. XVIII.
4. Can You Forgive Her?, Ch. IV

17 comments :

  1. I've just discovered this blog. Great work!

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  2. The first garden party was invented by Simon Raven. The 'Phineas Finn' garden party is used, and very effectively, in Episode 11, and in its true place as you suggest. You should have persevered with the series - it's really excellent and follows the books give or take to the end. I'm familiar with the books and don't feel the series was a travesty at all. The first episode was created to dramatise Plantagenet and Glencora's back story and be it good or bad don't let it put you off the rest. Give it another go - you're missing a treat.

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  3. Thanks, Anonymous, for the suggestion to continue with The Pallisers. I do feel that the series has some major casting and script issues, but of course I'm making my judgments on a perhaps unfairly small sample of the whole. We've liked every other BBC Trollope adaptation we've seen, especially The Barchester Chronicles (1982), so perhaps we should give this one another chance.

    Thanks again for your comment!

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  4. It is too bad that the series has the look of a home video. The costumes and sets are all sumptuous. I think it is unfair to criticize the casting of the major characters in terms of age. The actors cast had to portray their characters over a long time span. How would young looking actors portay the mature Planty and Glencora?

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  5. John, you're right that the series, like the novels it's based on, covers a large time span—at least two decades—and that does indeed raise casting difficulties. However, as I mention above, Plantagenet Palliser's relative youth is an important issue in the novels, a dimension that's entirely lost by casting a middle-aged actor in the role.

    Since the characters start out so young, they're not actually that old by the end of the novels: Plantagenet Palliser is in his mid-40s, while Lady Glen is not yet 40. By choosing actors who already seem those ages at the beginning of the series, the development of the characters and the narrative is distorted, in my view. The Pallisers just isn't the Pallisers.

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    1. The series stretched for nearly 30 years, not a mere 20.

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    2. Liz, in the article "Chronology and History in Trollope's Barset and Parliamentary Novels," (see the full citation in my reply to your comment below), Frank Robbins has explored the time span of the Palliser novels, and finds that Trollope is not fully consistent.

      Going by the age of Lady Glencora and Plantagenet Palliser's eldest child Lord Silverbridge in the final novel in the series, The Duke's Children, the novels span at most 25 years (I say above, "at least two decades"). Lady Glencora dies, though, at the beginning of the 18-month period covered in The Duke's Children. Going by the narrator's statements about the passage of time, they cover only 18 years (the time span over which they were written).

      Best,

      P.

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  6. Here there's another error of casting, or direction. Lady Dumbello is portrayed with a very thick upper-class accent (so clipped and mumbled we could hardly understand what she was saying). In Trollope's novel, however, before she became Lady Dumbello she was Griselda Grantly, the daughter of a country priest—someone unlikely to have such an upper-crust accent.


    Even the lesser sons of gentry families have been known to join the Church of England. Did the novel make it clear which class Lady Dumbello's father came from?

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  7. Griselda Grantly is the daughter of Archdeacon Theophilus Grantly. Archdeacon Grantly is the only son of Bishop Grantly, who is introduced in The Warden and dies in Barchester Towers (see A guide to the novels of Anthony Trollope, Part 1: The Chronicles of Barsetshire).

    We're not told very much about Bishop Grantly's background, but we are informed that his income as bishop was £9000 a year, which allowed him to bequeath substantial wealth to his son. Of his son, we are told in The Last Chronicle of Barset that "He had lived all his life on terms of equality with the best of the gentry around him" (Ch. 5), which suggests to me that he is not himself a member of the gentry. He has an income of over £5000 a year deriving from his position both as archdeacon and as the Rector of Plumstead Episcopi, thanks to his father. So the archdeacon is wealthy, educated and ambitious for his children—but he isn't a member of the aristocracy. Griselda is, but only by marriage—which doesn't explain the accent.

    Thanks for your comment, which sent me back to the novels and to other reference sources such as The Penguin Companion To Trollope by Richard Mullen with James Munson (Penguin, 1996), and the excellent Everyone and Everything in Trollope, compiled and edited by George Newlin (M.E. Sharpe, 2005).

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    1. Somehow I missed this post of yours, where I see that you addressed it. You're right about the casting, particularly Plantagenet Palliser and Lady Dumbello. They were horribly cast. And Griselda was frankly entirely rewritten. Trollope's Lady Dumbello did not speak in the entire group of novels as much as she spoke in that garden party scene, not even to Mr. Palliser. I actually got used to Glencora, though. She certainly looked quite young and her personality was quite well portrayed. One of these things is not like the others - and that's certainly Glencora.

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    2. Anne, I thought Susan Hampshire was perfect as Signora Madeline Neroni in the BBC's Barchester Chronicles (there's a capsule review in the Updates section of my survey of Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire novels). Here, though, I still have reservations about her casting as Lady Glencora (and more substantially, with the way the writers have depicted Lady G.).

      Best,

      P.

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  8. [" In Trollope's novel, however, before she became Lady Dumbello she was Griselda Grantly, the daughter of a country priest—someone unlikely to have such an upper-crust accent."]



    Even a country priest could come from an upper class family. Class was about bloodline, not merely money or profession.

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    1. You're right. Griselda is not the daughter of a "country priest." She comes from a very wealthy family. In addition, her father is an archdeacon (one step below a bishop) and her grandfather was a bishop. Her silence has nothing to do with her being afraid. She is heartless and has no mind beyond dresses, jewelry, and other finery. It's brought out in the novels that whereas her parents were able to successfully serve both God and Mammon, she has learned only the latter.

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    2. Anne, you and Juanita are both correct. Griselda's family is very wealthy (although as I mention above, not aristocratic—Archdeacon Grantly is a member of what historian Alan Everitt has called the "pseudo-gentry," professions that did not earn their income directly from estate rents, but were not tradesmen). When she marries Lord Dumbello, she marries into the aristocracy. I can see her adopting such a thick accent after her marriage, perhaps, but not before.

      You’re also right about her essential emptiness. She is silent because she generally has nothing to say. The idea that she would be discussing the details of financial reform with Plantagenet Palliser contradicts everything that Trollope indicates about her character and mentality.

      Thanks for your comments!

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  9. Yet another example of miscasting: Lady Glencora M'Cluskie "has only been out a few months," as we are told by one of the characters in The Pallisers, placing her in her late teens. The actress portraying her, Susan Hampshire, was 37, and even though she looks younger than her age is still far too old. Plus, Raven has her behaving far too brazenly with her swain Burgo Fitzgerald. Lady Glencora is flirtatious, but would hardly kiss her partner openly on the dance floor before all her family and acquaintances—no young woman of her class, situation and era would.


    This argument would hold water if the series was only set during the period of the first six to twelve episodes. But "THE PALLISERS" stretches out to nearly 30 years, which means Hampshire had to portray the character as she ages from her late teens to at least her late 40s or early 50s.

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    1. Many thanks for your comment, but I'm afraid I can't agree with you about the chronology of the novels, the casting of the series, or the characterization of Lady Glencora.

      The chronology of Trollope's novels is not fully consistent—hardly a surprise, considering that they were published serially over many years. In The Small House at Allington (1864) we learn that "that spring [probably culminating in Queen Charlotte's Ball in May] Lady Glencora MacCluskie was brought out before the world," meaning that she is probably 18, and that "before the end of the season [that is, the end of June]. . .everything was settled" about her engagement to Plantagenet Palliser. In Can You Forgive Her? (1864) we're told that she is married "late in the [same] season"; her family is in haste to get her married because of her attraction to the highly unsuitable Burgo Fitzgerald.

      Lady Glencora does not even enter her 30s until the fifth novel in the series, The Prime Minister (1876), which spans three years, and she dies before the start of The Duke's Children (1879), the final novel in the series. In that novel we learn that her firstborn child, now Lord Silverbridge, is 22. Adding in a couple of years for the period covering the first year of her marriage and then her pregnancy means that when she dies Lady Glencora is perhaps 42, and the entire Palliser series spans at most 25 years (see Frank Robbins, "Chronology and History in Trollope's Barset and Parliamentary Novels," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 5, No. 4 (March 1951), pp. 303-316, available via JSTOR.)

      So casting an actor in her late 30s in the role of Lady Glencora means that the age of the character doesn't catch up with that of the actor until the series is in its final episodes; this is also true of almost every other character, as I note in the post. The roles could have been cast with actors still young enough to convincingly portray their youthful characters, and aging them over the course of the series using makeup, wigs and costuming. This was done brilliantly with Francesca Annis in the series Lillie (1978), which covers a far greater time span: six decades rather than two and a half. Or, each character could have been portrayed by two or three progressively older actors over the course of the series (as is being done currently in The Crown).

      Finally, there's simply no excuse for having Lady Glencora kiss Burgo Fitzgerald as they are dancing, surrounded by other couples and onlookers. It would be a scandalous violation of decorum and would render it impossible for Palliser to make her an offer of marriage.

      That said, I enjoyed (and agree with) your review of The Barchester Chronicles, in which Susan Hampshire was far better cast, and which I've also praised.

      Best,

      P.

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