Autobiography of Anthony Trollope | Page 6

explained to him. I never saw one of those servants without feeling
I had picked his pocket.
When I had been at Winchester something over three years, my father
returned to England and took me away. Whether this was done because
of the expense, or because my chance of New College was supposed to

have passed away, I do not know. As a fact, I should, I believe, have
gained the prize, as there occurred in my year an exceptional number of
vacancies. But it would have served me nothing, as there would have
been no funds for my maintenance at the University till I should have
entered in upon the fruition of the founder's endowment, and my career
at Oxford must have been unfortunate.
When I left Winchester, I had three more years of school before me,
having as yet endured nine. My father at this time having left my
mother and sisters with my younger brother in America, took himself to
live at a wretched tumble-down farmhouse on the second farm he had
hired! And I was taken there with him. It was nearly three miles from
Harrow, at Harrow Weald, but in the parish; and from this house I was
again sent to that school as a day-boarder. Let those who know what is
the usual appearance and what the usual appurtenances of a boy at such
a school, consider what must have been my condition among them,
with a daily walk of twelve miles through the lanes, added to the other
little troubles and labours of a school life!
Perhaps the eighteen months which I passed in this condition, walking
to and fro on those miserably dirty lanes, was the worst period of my
life. I was now over fifteen, and had come to an age at which I could
appreciate at its full the misery of expulsion from all social intercourse.
I had not only no friends, but was despised by all my companions. The
farmhouse was not only no more than a farmhouse, but was one of
those farmhouses which seem always to be in danger of falling into the
neighbouring horse-pond. As it crept downwards from house to stables,
from stables to barns, from barns to cowsheds, and from cowsheds to
dungheaps, one could hardly tell where one began and the other ended!
There was a parlour in which my father lived, shut up among big books;
but I passed my most jocund hours in the kitchen, making innocent
love to the bailiff's daughter. The farm kitchen might be very well
through the evening, when the horrors of the school were over; but it all
added to the cruelty of the days. A sizar at a Cambridge college, or a
Bible-clerk at Oxford, has not pleasant days, or used not to have them
half a century ago; but his position was recognised, and the misery was
measured. I was a sizar at a fashionable school, a condition never
premeditated. What right had a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from a
dunghill, to sit next to the sons of peers,--or much worse still, next to

the sons of big tradesmen who made their ten thousand a year? The
indignities I endured are not to be described. As I look back it seems to
me that all hands were turned against me,--those of masters as well as
boys. I was allowed to join in no plays. Nor did I learn anything,--for I
was taught nothing. The only expense, except that of books, to which a
house-boarder was then subject, was the fee to a tutor, amounting, I
think, to ten guineas. My tutor took me without the fee; but when I
heard him declare the fact in the pupil-room before the boys, I hardly
felt grateful for the charity. I was never a coward, and cared for a
thrashing as little as any boy, but one cannot make a stand against the
acerbities of three hundred tyrants without a moral courage of which at
that time I possessed none. I know that I skulked, and was odious to the
eyes of those I admired and envied. At last I was driven to rebellion,
and there came a great fight,--at the end of which my opponent had to
be taken home for a while. If these words be ever printed, I trust that
some schoolfellow of those days may still be left alive who will be able
to say that, in claiming this solitary glory of my school-days, I am not
making a false boast.
I wish I could give some adequate picture of the gloom of that
farmhouse. My elder brother--Tom as I must call him in my narrative,
though the world, I think, knows him best as Adolphus--was at Oxford.
My father and I lived together, he