One of England's most popular novelists in the 19th century, Anthony Trollope worked for more than 30 years as a civil servant and is widely considered "a literary craftsman of the middle class." Henry James said of Trollope that "his great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual."
Originally published in 1880, "The Plumber" is a late example of character-writing--a generalized but detailed description of the appearance and behavior of a class or type. As you consider Trollope's different perspectives on his subject ("an angel of light" and "a pest about our house") along with the references to other professions, keep in mind that the author's father was a failed barrister.
The Plumber
by Anthony Trollope
The plumber, painter and glazier of our youth has disappeared, and in lieu of him has come up the man who mends our kitchen furniture and destroys our roofs. Such, at least, is the reputation which our friend the plumber enjoys. We do not say that of our own knowledge it is deserved. We do not profess to declare that he plans the perforation of our leads. We cannot so far condemn the man who continually haunts our premises, and whose half-yearly bill is of all our torments the most regular, bearing a proportion to our rent which we should have regarded as formidable had we anticipated the necessity of these periodical visits. The plumber should be put down with the tax -gatherer as being as certain as fate and as inexorable--almost as serious. You shall put your house into excellent order and think to have seen that the last of him for years; but he will be there again till the sight of him is a perpetual eyesore to you. You will come to have an unnatural hatred for the man and his myrmidons. He leaves nothing behind for you to eat as does the butcher, nothing to wear as does the tailor, nothing to delight you--nothing, finally, in which you may exult among your acquaintances. Whoever spoke among his friends of his plumber or boasted of his intimacy with that dark, silent, seemingly sullen man, who comes so frequently and on his coming has nothing to say for himself? The plumber is doubtless aware that he is odious. He feels himself, like Dickens's turnpike-man, to be the enemy of mankind. He has probably a wife at home and pretty children whom he fondles; but you, as you look at him, believe him to be alone in the world, and fancy him to be a man unblessed. How can one so saturnine press a wife to his bosom, or participate in the infantine gambols of children? Meet him in the street, and he does not, as your baker does, meet your eye with a half-ready and half-humble smile of acknowledgment. He walks by in silence, apparently engaged as to his thoughts in plotting some infernal hole among the roofs, or arranging for a future catastrophe with the water-pipes. You pass on, taking no heed of the obdurate sinner, but you turn him and his deeds over in your mind, and thank the Lord that in arranging for you your lot in life he did not make you a plumber.
We are far from saying that such is the true character of the man. We remember in a romance the story of one who was presumed to have made himself abominable to all his fellow-creatures. He was an executioner, and as such lived a miserable, a solitary, and a despised life. But he was in truth a general benefactor of the human race, and spent his whole time in doing magnificent deeds as to which he was content that the whole world should be ignorant of their existence. The nature of the mystery need not be explained here, but such was the fate of this hero. We have sometimes thought how possible it may be that our plumber is like that executioner, only that his mystery may be more easily solved. Can it be that he is really engaged in mending, according to the just rules of his trade, those leakages among the leads, in conquering those fugitive smells, in stopping those pernicious runnings of water, in reducing to order those rebellious bells, in ridding our rooms of the smoke that will not fly upwards, and that he does all this to the best of his ability with true workman-like assiduity and conscience? And he must be aware at the time of what the world is saying of him. That he is aware we are very certain. His looks betray him. We are perfectly sure that he knows the doom that has been pronounced against him. There is something in his gait, in his manner, in his sullen indifference to all remonstrance, which assures us that it is so. He cannot have been about our house so often and have known so little of us, have been so little intimate with us or with our servants, have smiled so seldom--seldom! nay, never--had he not been the malevolent influence, as which the world regards him; or else that hero of romance, that unknown, mistaken, long-suffering, patriotic man, whom the world has conspired to condemn, but who knows himself to be pure.
On this subject we ourselves offer no opinion. We take the man simply as we find him, and leave the doubt to be decided according to the various idiosyncrasies of our readers. The man, though he be an angel of light, is undoubtedly a pest about our house; and, as far as our observation goes, the nearer to your street is that in which he lives the greater and more frequent becomes the annoyance. If perchance you live in the country, far removed from the resort of plumbers, where molten lead is a thing almost unknown, you shall hardly hear of him; and yet you live. You are neither killed by the smells, nor drowned by the water, nor destroyed by the weather. If once in three years a man pays you a visit from the neighbouring town, six or seven miles distant, he does what he has to do at one coming, and then departs. There is no time for him to leave an impression on your mind that he is your especial enemy. But in London he is to you as the skeleton in the cupboard, as the invisible guest who is present at all your feasts.
Concluded on page two
