"Cutting-up the Whitehall Cake": "Phineas Redux" begins

"Phineas Redux" begins with its hero called back from his Irish retreat by the Liberal Party and seemlessly renewing the relationships from two years earlier described in "Phineas Finn." His Irish retreat is seen as perhaps just a parenthesis in his social and political career in London -- a parenthesis that includes the death in childbirth of his wife.

Until Finn's , there had been no contact with his former associates, which Trollope treats as part of the normal order of things: "Distance in time and place, but especially in time, will diminish friendship. It is a rule of nature that it should be so and the friendships which a man most fosters are those which he can beat enjoy. If your friend leave you, and seek a residence in Patagonia, make a niche for him in your memory, and keep him there as warm as you may. Perchance, he may return from Patagonia and the old joys repeated. But never think that those joys can be maintained by the assistance of ocean postage, let it be at never so cheap a rate."

Finn has been recruited to run for parliament from an industrial district called Tankerville for which neither he nor Trollope see much appeal: "Tankerville was a dirty, prosperous, ungainly town, which seemed to exude coal-dust or coal-mud at every pore. It was so well recognized as being dirty that people did not expect to meet each other with clean hands and faces. Linen was never white at Tankerville, and even ladies who sat in drawing rooms were accustomed to the feel and taste of soot in all their dantiest recesses. . . . At Tankerville, coal was much loved and was not thought to be dirty."

The reader is duly reassured that it would not be part of Phineas' duty to actually reside in the be-grimed district he proposes to represent.

Finn had been recruited by the Liberals as part of their plan to regain the Parliamentary majority. They are irritated that the Conservatives, in their brief time in power, have so effectively taken advantage of the spoils system: "For to them, Liberals, this cutting up of the Whitehall cake by the Conservatives was spoilation when the priviledge of cutting was found to have so much exceeded what had been expected. . . . Was it to be borne that an unprincipled so-called Conservative Prime Minister should go on slicing the cake after such a fashion as so lately adopted?"

Trollope introduces the determinedly idle Gerald Maule, a guest at the home Phineas's old friends Oswald and Violet Chilterns, where he indifferently foxhunts and courts Adelaide Palliser.

Maule is wary of Oswald's foxhunting zeal, opining that he goes about it "as if his soul depended on it." Adelaide counters that Oswald is "very energetic," to which Maule responds: "a bull in a china shop is not a useful animal, nor is he ornamental, but there can be no doubt of his energy. . . . The man who stands still is the man who keeps his ground."

Adelaide is foolishly courted by a member of the gentry -- Trollope signals the mockery to be accorded such a venture by dubbing him Spooner of Spoon Hall and identifying his mother as one of the Platters of Platter House. Spooner believes he should be taken seriously by the distant, and near-peniless Adelside, as he is both more wealthy and a better foxhunter than the lackadaisical Maule.

Adelaide is appalled and insulted by Spooner's lack of recognition of the class divide between them. He says, fumbling: "You seem to think I'm something, -- something altogether beneath you." regarding which Trollope comments: "And so in truth she did. Miss Palliser had never analyzed her own feelings and emotions about the Spooners whom she met in society; but she probably conceived that there were people in thhe world who, from certain accidents, were accustomed to sit at dinner with her, but who were no more fitted for her intimacy than were the servants who waited upon her. Such people were to her little more than the tables and chairs with which she was brought into contact."

At the Chilterns, Phineas becomes reacquainted with the fascinating and masterly Mrs. Goesler, whose European wealth allow her to maneuver through and around the English class system. She continues to be devoted to care of the now-addled Duke of Omnium, with whom she began a flirtation after Phineas rejected her.

The parliamentary session, and the electoral battle between Liberals and Conservatives, turns on religion -- on the state establishment of the Church of England. But there is no true ideological battle as the real maneuvering is over power and spoils.

Lady Laura's spurned husband Robert Kennedy is truly animated by fierce religion and has converted his estate into a kind of hermit's retreat -- unlit fireplaces, empty candlesticks, scant food -- while he homicidally fumes over his wife's desertion. He wants her back not as a matter of happiness but to join him in godfearing misery: "Happy? What right had she to expect to be happy here? Are we not told that we are to look for happiness there, and to hope for none below? . . . I do not want her to make her to make me happy. I do not want to be made happy. I wanted her to do her duty."

Laura Kennedy in her German exile lamenting the briefness of Phineas, visit: "But when the lamp for a while burns with special brightness, there always comes afterwards a corresponding dullness."

Trollope's sense of love and passion (in Phineas' retrospection of his failed suit for Laura): "He knew now, or thought he knew, -- that the continued indulgence of a hopeless passion was a folly opposed to the very instincts of man and woman, -- a weakness showing want of fiber and muscle in the character."

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