Trollope’s Orley Farm
Why Orley Farm? Quite simply, it is a great novel about legal ethics, and Shaffer has drawn large conclusions from it about his themes of law, lawyers, morals, adversary representation, truth, and community.
I begin by quoting Shaffer’s own summary of its plot:Orley Farm is the story of a guilty woman, Lady Mary Mason, who has forged what appears to be a codicil to the will of her dying husband, Sir Joseph Mason. She has done this twenty years before the novel begins. The codicil has been proved, in litigation, through Lady Mason’s testimony. As a result, her son Lucius is in possession of the devise at issue, Orley Farm. Sir Joseph’s eldest son, Joseph Mason, has been cheated out of the farm. He is a child of Sir Joseph by a former marriage; Lucius is Lady Mason’s only child. Her forgery is like the misdeed of the biblical Rebekah; she has acted dishonestly to benefit her child.
A scheming and vengeful solicitor named Dockwrath has, as he believes, been mistreated by Lucius. Dockwrath sets out to prove the forgery from old documents which will show how Lady Mason got through the will contest. What she did was this: On the day the codicil was supposedly executed the witnesses to it signed another document for Sir Joseph - a partnership deed. Lady Mason gave the codicil that same date; the witnesses to the deed thought (and testified) that what they signed was the codicil. Dockwrath produces the partnership deed and the aging witnesses, and the witnesses are prepared to say that they signed only one paper. Dockwrath succeeds in getting Joseph Mason and his respectable London lawyers to agree to prosecute Lady Mason for perjury, based on her testimony in the will contest. That is the suspense in the story. Trollope thought it was his best plot in forty-seven novels.[569]
So far, so good. However, Shaffer’s lucid plot summary is incomplete.
He omits one important feature of the plot, without which I think we cannot understand the moral situation in its richness. That feature is the circumstance that led Lady Mason to her crime.Sir Joseph Mason was a very wealthy man, and Orley Farm - “a small country house”[570] - is only a small portion of Sir Joseph’s estate. Sir Joseph’s actual will provided small incomes for Lady Mason and Lucius, but he left everything else, including Orley Farm and a far larger estate at Groby Park, to his eldest son Joseph, Lucius’s half brother (OF I.1-2). The codicil that Lady Mason forged made just one change in these devises. Lady Mason was a clever forger - she knew enough not to be too greedy, and her codicil awarded Lucius only one additional prize, namely the modest farm (Orley Farm) on which she and Lucius were already living (OF I.2-4). The insignificant amount of the loss does not mollify Joseph Mason, however. For twenty years, he has seethed with bitter resentment that he did not get everything. When we first meet him, Trollope describes him as “a bad man in that he could never forget and never forgive... He was a man who considered that it behoved him as a man to resent all injuries, and to have his pound of flesh in all cases” (OF I.49). As Trollope reminds us several times, Mason’s only regret at the prospect of seeing Lady Mason imprisoned for perjury is that he would prefer to see her hanged (OF I.61). As the novel progresses, we watch his hatred of Lady Mason grow and devour him, and by the time it ends, nothing remains of Joseph Mason except his hatred, tempered by a small, redeeming smidgen of rational self-interest. Shaffer does not mention any of this; later, we will see why this omission is important.
The story of the litigation is not all there is to the plot, of course. Trollope also provides a large cast of supporting characters with designs of their own, no fewer than six love triangles, and a number of set-piece genre scenes - over 600 vastly entertaining pages.
I will bring in other bits of the plot as we need them.Orley Farm has plenty of lawyers in its cast in addition to the vindictive Dockwrath. Most significant among them is Thomas Furnival, Lady Mason’s attorney in the earlier litigation over the authenticity of the will, and her principal legal advisor in the perjury litigation. As Furnival becomes increasingly convinced that Lady Mason is in serious trouble, he brings in two skilled gutter-fighter criminal defense lawyers, the barrister Chaffanbrass and the attorney Solomon Aram. To this legal team Furnival adds Felix Graham, a young barrister who is also the romantic lead in the novel. On the other side we meet the respected London firm of Round and Crook, with its elder partner Round, who opposed Furnival in the will litigation twenty years past, and his son Matt Round, who handles the prosecution case for Joseph Mason against Lady Mason. There are other lawyers as well, but these are the most important.