‘‘[T]he very clothes they wear’: The male body dressed and undressed in Anthony Trollope’s Irish Fiction’ - Yvonne Siddle, University of Chester

‘‘[T]he very clothes they wear’: The male body dressed and undressed in Anthony Trollope’s Irish Fiction’

Yvonne Siddle, University of Chester

Effective and sympathetic characterisation was for Anthony Trollope much more crucial than plot. In An Autobiography he explained that he wanted his readers to feel that they were encountering ‘human beings like to them selves’ [...] men and women with flesh and blood.’ In order to achieve this, the author, he insisted, must not only create but also co-exist with his characters:

He desires to make his readers so intimately acquainted with his characters that the creations of his brain should be to them speaking, moving, living human creatures. This he can never do unless he know these fictitious personages himself, and he can never know them well unless he can live with them in the full reality of established intimacy. They must be with him as he lies down to sleep and as he wakes from his dreams…I have lived with my characters, and thence has come whatever success I have obtained. There is a gallery of them, of all that gallery I may say that I know the tone of voice, and the colour of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the very clothes they wear.

 When it comes to Trollope’s Irish fiction ‘the very clothes’ worn by his characters, and in particular his male characters, have a story to tell beyond their ostensible narrative function. This paper will examine from a twenty-first century perspective what that story reveals about both Trollope’s relationship with Ireland, and the relationship between Ireland and England in the Victorian period.

2a: Fabricating Masculinity (Chair: Sarah Heaton) – CWE 124