If the path to heaven is as narrow as the proverbial “needle's eye,” a doctrinal idea entirely consistent with the evangelical bent of both the Rev. Obadiah Slope and Mrs. Proudie of Barchester Towers, the traditional channels of gossip appear equally constricted. Because, at least conventionally, the lower classes democratically gossip about the behavior of the upper classes (so as to bring them down to the level where they might be trafficked) rather than the other way around, Bishop Proudie's wife would do a disservice to her pronominal station were she to physically stoop to keyholes or chinks. She remains in posture as well as morally, upright, even if it is a strain. In contradistinction from the eavesdropping posture of the lower-class gossip, Mrs. Proudie misses another communicative channel of political culture: “that friendly pressure,” a little “extra squeeze of the hand” (BT I 167). Such is the inarticulated pressure conveying a bishop's consent to his chaplain's scheme for denying his wife's choice for an impending vacancy for the new warden of Hiram's Hospital. Although escaping the auditory register, it does not escape the omniscient narrator's awareness of a “force” having a formless mediacy.

Her social pride distances her from a lineage of gossips in nineteenth-century British fiction like Mrs. Bates (Emma) and Mrs. Norris (Mansfield Park); Nelly Dean (Wuthering Heights); Mrs. Cadwallader (Middlemarch); or later, the unforgettable Mrs. Bolton (Lady Chatterley's Lover). Not the unmarried singer of a community's hidden songs and secrets, typically beyond the age of marriage, an exemption which liberates them from participation in the marital market, Mrs. Proudie is the spouse of a bishop of the Church of England.

Introduction

In the last section of his 1948 article “Dutch-Spanish Rivalry in the Caribbean,” Sluiter concludes that the policies implemented in 1606 by the Spanish Crown to inundate the Araya salt pans, to prohibit tobacco cultivation along the coast of Tierra Firme, and to depopulate coastal areas and relocate residents of Northwestern Hispaniola, were meant to chokeoff the smuggling going on in their territories. The documents analyzed in the previous two chapters illustrate the process by which this took place. In both Tierra Firme and on Hispaniola, Portuguese residents were key to the contraband trade with Dutch merchants who sailed along the coasts and up the rivers in Tierra Firme and along the shores of Hispaniola to drop anchor and to take tobacco on-board in exchange for cloth or woolen and silk goods, implements, and arms in high demand among coastal populations. From the documents presented we learn that among the crew on Dutch vessels were Portuguese merchants or pilots likely related to or linked in trade with Portuguese resident merchants on shore. In a Cedula issued by the Crown on October 28, 1606, the expulsion of all Dutch and Flemings was ordered in Tierra Firme and in the case of Hispaniola 10 merchants from the Dutch Republic were being rounded up. On November 10, 1607, the Council of the Indies recommended and the King approved that a branch of the Holy Office be erected in Hispaniola which suggests that the Portuguese were suspected of Judaizing. Sluiter (1948) does recognize that in the meantime the first negotiations for a truce between the Spanish and the Dutch had begun and that ports of the Iberian Peninsula would open again for Dutch trade to resume which would take away the incentive to haul salt or tobacco, pearls, and hides from the Caribbean. So, the stick and the carrot approach was applied, apparently, but it did not end the contraband tobacco trade.

In fact, the ban on tobacco cultivation and relocation of coastal populations encouraged tobacco smuggling and invited mariners and merchants to come on shore and bribe officials and both the Dutch and English mariners continued to trade, raid, or barter.

This volume conceptually began as a response to an exposure to public opinion formation: literary criticism. A reviewer of my Gossip and Subversion in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction: Echo's Economies found, to my pleasant surprise, much to praise. But in the same essay, the reviewer who, like much public opinion, should perhaps remain anonymous, also queried a conspicuous absence: the lack of interest in victims, those gossiped about. Her criticism, as the best criticism always does, initiated self-criticism. For, it was not the first time that my lack of sympathy for the victimized had been queried.

Compassion for the unfamiliar is always difficult, but perhaps particularly so for the critic who risks imaginary detachment (a fictional autonomy masking as objectivity) from feelings that risk sentimentality. Given the expanding population of those who see themselves as victims of some prejudice, sympathy is tempered by the universality of the experience. Ours is an age marked by the proliferation of the presumably sincere account of harm at the hands of unacknowledged institutional or personal aggression.

Although each of us is immersed in it and lives in our negotiated responses and defenses to public opinion, it can be manipulated for temporary or permanent advantage. It seems a medium of existence as well as exchange that we cannot avoid insofar as we have a place in a discursive society, enhanced now by speedier platforms and easier access. In the novels of Anthony Trollope public opinion becomes a master narrative, often displacing other narratives.

In discussing public opinion and how it is formed, negotiated and represented to those who live in it (and are re-represented in their responses to it), we should admit at the outset that it resists easy address as a traditional subject. For public opinion lacks a proper “self,” more nearly resembling a “form,” “structure” and movement of potentially infinite referral (renvoi), as Jean-Luc Nancy once described the non-indexical and nonsignficational modes of listening characteristic of musical performances. When we address public opinion formation in the Barsetshire Novels and the Palliser Novels (often referred to as the Parliamentary Novels) of “our” Anthony Trollope, the Victorian novelist who continually probes how his characters both shape it and respond to its shaping of them, we are really addressing a new kind of philosophical subject in the novel.

The story of the tobacco trade in the Atlantic world in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is a story of entanglement among different merchant groups embedded in trans-imperial connections which transcended political or state boundaries and ethnic associations. The different participants in trade included European colonial settlers, native and indigenous people, run-away slaves, and merchants of various kinds and backgrounds and formed part of a network of contact that had developed over time engaged in tobacco cultivation, trade, and smuggling. In the story, I will focus on Portuguese merchants who straddled the Portuguese, Spanish, and North European maritime Atlantic world and Sephardic or Portuguese Jewish merchants who traded on behalf of the Dutch after they resumed Jewish identity with residency in the Dutch Republic. In some instances, the Sephardic merchants were the key link facilitating Dutch trade in particular in Amsterdam. A good example is Simon de Herrera, a Portuguese Jew who had connections and associations with both English and Dutch merchants and smugglers. He was captured in Hispaniola by the Spanish in 1596 and during the court case against him following his arrest it was discovered that he held documents which implicated him with Dutch interests and contacts as he was offered safe passage to Holland or Zeeland in the Dutch Republic. Being Jewish and charged with trading for the Dutch he became a target for the Inquisition. The Dutch were at war with Spain at the time which did not improve his chances to be let free. He was taken for trial in Mexico and executed in 1604. Herrera had likely been a factor or agent for a Dutch merchant who traded illegally with the Portuguese and Spanish in the Caribbean. Hispaniola had by then become a regular transfer point for Dutch, English, and French privateers engaged in the tobacco trade.

Contraband trade and war is all too familiar in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the case of the Dutch Republic, it were the circumstances dictated by the Eighty Years’ War with Habsburg Spain that explain how trade or exchange was conducted.

Contraband and Trade Rivalry in the Eighty Years’ War

As described in the first two chapters, Dutch–Spanish and Dutch–Portuguese trade relations in the early seventeenth century were determined to a large extent by the ebb and flow of battles, embargoes, and trade protection measures in effect during the Eighty Years’ War when the Dutch were at war with Habsburg Spain from 1568 to 1648 the time at the end of which the Dutch established hegemony in the Atlantic economy. Only during the Twelve Years’ Truce between the warring parties from 1609 to 1621 did some order of normalcy return to Iberian-Dutch commercial exchange but trade with Tierra Firme and the Spanish Caribbean islands remained off limits to Dutch merchants as Spanish trade and navigation rules and prohibitions remained in effect. For much of the time, trade rivalry between Habsburg Spain and the Dutch Republic continued unabated and sea battles occurred at regular intervals. At entry points to major rivers where the Spanish held sway over self-declared territorial rule, embargoes and blockades were imposed by both parties and thus trade and navigation was regularly obstructed. Along the coasts of Tierra Firme and the Caribbean islands Dutch merchants tried to undermine Spanish control and intrude upon Spanish territory with some resolve but often only temporarily. Brazil was a Portuguese possession but as Portugal was united with Spain from 1580 until 1640, Spanish territorial control and trade restrictions affected Brazil as well even though Portugal continued to trade on a semi-autonomous basis. In any event, all Dutch trade as well as trade conducted by Sephardic merchants resident in the Dutch Republic was illegal trade as far as the Spanish were concerned and therefore, typically, not recorded contractually. So, in effect, we have only incidental evidence of the Dutch–Spanish and Dutch–Portuguese tobacco trade from official freight records in the Notary Public records in the City Archive of Amsterdam for the early seventeenth century as discussed in the previous chapters.

Dutch mariners were trespassers and illegal merchants in the Iberian colonial world and in the traditional carrying trade with the Iberian Peninsula, including Portuguese ports, which were officially blocked from 1580 until the start of the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609–1621).

The words spoken by the Duke of St. Bungay, an elder Liberal Party patriarch, an endorsement of the candidacy of Plantagenet Palliser as a future chancellor of the exchequer, suggests that efficient economic management, like the maintenance of land or reputation, is a respected, if vaguely defined, skill. The discipline required by material management has potentially wider applications to policy. But his endorsement is no different from that of Scruby, the electoral agent (later, upwardly mobile as a clerk for Attorney Chaffanbrass in Phineas Redux), who urges tight management upon his client, George Vavasor, even while conceding that his candidate's advertising has been consigned to an agent with largely absentee supervision. Proper management involves delegation of authority, apparently, though the deputized are often invisible.

Although thought of as a thinly-veiled portrait of a younger Trollope's experience while at the General Post Office, The Three Clerks (1857) is much richer insofar as it portrays a politics (as the distribution of power) within government agencies charged with the regulation and maintenance of public services. The plot is driven initially by two young clerks, Harry Norman and Alaric Tudor, his close friend, apprenticed to Weights and Measures, and a third, cousin to Alaric, Charley Tudor, consigned to a less dignified branch, Internal Navigation (or “Navvies”). The class system is pervasive, even in institutions dedicating to servicing the public at large. There, Tudor enjoys a somewhat louche after-hours sociality with an assortment of barmaids and dance hall companions. In another of Trollope's interregnums, there are at least three possible (albeit conflicting) avenues to membership in the civil service. Political access to the governing class, enabling future bureaucrats to “hang on round the outer corners of the State's temple” (TTC 81), would appear to have a number of competing avenues. Friendship with or descent from nobility; a newly instituted system of rigorous examination by committee to determine entry and staged promotion; and finally—and most idealistically—knowledge acquired by direct experience would all qualify. Yet, a retired seaman on pension at half-pay, the crusty Captain Cuttwater represents the hopelessness of experience ever qualifying one for a position at, say, Admiralty, that might usefully make room for his vast knowledge of seafaring.

Introduction

According to Simon Schama in The Embarrassment of Riches (1987): “… The smell of the Dutch Republic was the smell of tobacco.” Describing the Dutch Golden Age, he referred to accounts by visitors to the Netherlands who were struck by the omnipresence of tobacco smoke in inns and towing barges and the common sight of men and women smoking in public. I am not sure if this was a general situation at the time, but it was certainly true that in depictions of hearth and home in Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century, tobacco pipes and smoking were prominent features. Tobacco consumption in Europe in the seventeenth century experienced a remarkable growth and provided substantial profits for merchants engaged in the tobacco trade. Yet, we know very little about its very beginnings and, in fact, you could say that compared to the sugar trade, the tobacco trade is terra incognita. In part, this is because the tobacco trade was contraband trade in the early seventeenth century when Portuguese and Sephardic merchants became engaged in exchange with the coastal regions of South America and the Caribbean islands under Spanish and Portuguese rule where Dutch merchants including Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchants were considered “interlopers”; foreign merchants with no license to trade. Furthermore, they were considered enemy merchants as the Dutch Republic was at war with Habsburg Spain during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648). Whereas we know the broad outline of various aspects of the tobacco contraband trade in the later part of the seventeenth century, we know very little about why and when Amsterdam became the European—or you might say—the global marketplace for tobacco or where tobacco was first traded for profit. Here, we need to delve into the history of Amsterdam as a staple market and the role Portuguese and Sephardic merchants played in the Spanish and Portuguese colonial trade. In the sixteenth century, Antwerp in Flanders (the Southern Netherlands) had been the main market place for colonial goods exchanged in Northwestern Europe, but toward the end of the century, Amsterdam replaced Antwerp in that role.

To address a specific kind of play in Trollope's Barsetshire Chronicles and the Palliser Novels is to encounter serious risks, not unlike those characters who commit to “gaming the system” in such radically different ways. If public opinion functions like traditional characters in a novel (as an imaginary, assembled body constructed by author, other characters, critics and readers), then we might logically expect development through time in the model of the Bildungsroman. A shared ideological body would mature into self-awareness, finding a secure place in the culture from which it initially seemed exiled. If public opinion, however, functions only as negation of the conventional body or part of some imaginary public sphere purged of individual interest, then its operations upon a system—its role in generating the consequential—would be of primary importance. It is, in a number of ramifications, “everybody” and “nobody” as we have seen. As part of an imaginary body, it would be defined in part by an account of inward investments of faith that enact it: Who came to believe in it and under what conditions? Who would hope to realize a return, be it professional, financial, comfort or public esteem, that might pay dividends in the future? To what extent are those who invest in public opinion really speculating on it, as opposed to pursuing or purchasing it, so as to be sufficiently nimble to vacate a position? The literary critic enjoys no exemption.

As a concept, play carries a considerable surplus of cultural baggage and literary history. We might, for example, commence with Huizinga's work and move through that of Roger Caillois to the various accounts of the performative “knights of misrule” in the Renaissance theater. Although all of these may “come into play,” Trollope rather uses the concept differently. It becomes synonymous with insincerity or the shirking of hard work and responsibility, hence duplicating the idleness of the privileged as they play social and conversational games that seem opposite to work. It is neither chance nor simulation, as Caillois suggested, nor is it invariably competitive.

Political, Economic, and Geographical Context

In A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea, Studnicki-Gizbert (2007) shows us repeated evidence of the role Portuguese New Christian merchants and their foreign partners played in smuggling activities and in bribing officials. As members of the Portuguese Nation they promoted and conducted “free trade” and brought the wrought upon them by cultivating an elaborate system of working within the system and accumulating and circulating wealth outside the realm. Operating within and outside the Spanish system they extended partnerships with merchants in Northern Europe and the Mediterranean region and with the various merchant communities in the Spanish American colonies. In the 1620s, prominent members of the Portuguese Nation formed a key group in the efforts to install Count-Duke of Olivares as Prime Minister under King Philip IV of Spain who promoted the imperial commonwealth of Spain and Portugal. Within the realm the Canary islands and Hispaniola were integral parts of the inter-locking system of trade which merchants of the Portuguese Nation promoted and served. The islands were points of contact where cargo was transferred and where foreign merchants engaged in contraband trade thrived.

In a World on the Move, Russell-Wood (1992) reminds us of the connections, interactions, and movement of goods and people in the early modern Atlantic world. Perhaps more than any place Hispaniola exemplified that characterization and Portuguese merchants were the most prominent examples. Commercial success depended on regular and sustained personal contact and circulation of goods via the transatlantic networks of merchants and mariners which provided a steady stream of information about supply of products, market prices, routes to sail, and people to stay in contact with. The breadth of such merchant networks expanded significantly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as Spain’s imperial reach widened and engaged Portuguese merchants and bankers after the unification of 1580. However, the role of Portuguese merchants in the Atlantic trade had been evident for some time before the unification as evidence from the slave trade and sugar trade demonstrates. Furthermore, slaving and smuggling often went hand in hand and Portuguese merchants were omnipresent where slaves were in demand, plantations emerged, and export of staple goods became the life blood of the colonial administration.

The ease with which both men and women develop an appetite for politics—as did Trollope himself—transforms how we think of public opinion and its component suppliers. A porously defined public comes to sit at previously exclusive or at least potentially monopolized metaphoric tables (with indifferent guardians), be it catering to ambition, enhanced social intercourse or reciprocal affection. This taste initially appears as “neo-Liberal,” perhaps akin to Trollope's self-identification insofar as it is potentially more socially inclusive. The attraction of favorable public opinion is a relatively universal taste across all classes and political parties.

Adam Kotsko has argued that neoliberalism is a form of political theology, albeit often exemplifying predatory inclusion. In both the theological and political novels of Trollope there is an emphasis on freedom and open markets, though not necessarily as an expression of choice or human creativity and dignity. Such open access by the public is rather an apparatus for reducing responsibility in favor of shared blameworthiness. Systemic failures are so dissolved as to be granular and individually unidentifiable, as the duke's eldest son, Lord Silverbridge, does under the duress of a public sympathetic with the foibles of the less advantaged, like Major Tifto in The Duke's Children. The dream of an inclusive discursive “commons” might be a preamble to Lawyer Chaffanbrass's judges in Phineas Redux, habitually handing down compromised verdicts by splitting the middle and dissolving differences, the better to avoid offending sensibilities.

This waiver of sovereignty (as firm judgment) yields to a general sugarcoating—a strategic neutralization of blame—which universally attracts while disguising what lies beneath. One might think of it as an adulteration of the sovereignty of private judgment by pressures of an imaginary collective voice. The negotiation of the loss of these sovereignties which had previously defined ideological, social and even narrative identity recalls Adorno's “constellation” with its pressures to “think about nonthinking.” Surely, this is one definition of public opinion, rhetorically touched upon by Trollope: “it should be a matter bound by our opinion rather than your own” (DC 171, ital. added) or perhaps more succinctly as a part of a negative dialectic “a thing not to be thought of which must be thought of” (DC 172).