An Autobiography of Anthony TrollopeTrollope, Anthony
General
An Autobiography of Anthony Trollope
Trollope, Anthony
Novelists, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882
After a while my brother left Winchester and accompanied my father
to America. Then another and a different horror fell to my fate.
My college bills had not been paid, and the school tradesmen who
administered to the wants of the boys were told not to extend their
credit to me. Boots, waistcoats, and pocket-handkerchiefs, which,
with some slight superveillance, were at the command of other
scholars, were closed luxuries to me. My schoolfellows of course knew
that it was so, and I became a Pariah. It is the nature of boys to
be cruel. I have sometimes doubted whether among each other they do
usually suffer much, one from the other's cruelty; but I suffered
horribly! I could make no stand against it. I had no friend to whom I
could pour out my sorrows. I was big, and awkward, and ugly, and, I
have no doubt, skulked about in a most unattractive manner. Of course
I was ill-dressed and dirty. But, ah! how well I remember all the
agonies of my young heart; how I considered whether I should always
be alone; whether I could not find my way up to the top of that
college tower, and from thence put an end to everything? And a worse
thing came than the stoppage of the supplies from the shopkeepers.
Every boy had a shilling a week pocket-money, which we called
battels, and which was advanced to us out of the pocket of the
second master. On one awful day the second master announced to me
that my battels would be stopped. He told me the reason,--the battels
for the last half-year had not been repaid; and he urged his own
unwillingness to advance the money. The loss of a shilling a week
would not have been much,--even though pocket-money from other
sources never reached me,--but that the other boys all knew it! Every
now and again, perhaps three or four times in a half-year, these
weekly shillings were given to certain servants of the college, in
payment, it may be presumed, for some extra services. And now, when
it came to the turn of any servant, he received sixty-nine shillings
instead of seventy, and the cause of the defalcation was explained
to him. I never saw one of those servants without feeling that 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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