Trilby was written by George Du Maurier and first appeared in Harper’s Monthly Magazine (Jan-July 1894). Du Maurier (1834-1896) is little-remembered today, and that just for being the grandfather of Daphne Du Maurier (of Rebecca fame). But in his lifetime George Du Maurier was a notable figure, both for his illustrations for Punch and for his writing. Du Maurier did achieve literary immortality through his creation of the word “svengali.” Trilby was hugely successful, one of the century’s bestsellers as a novel, and “svengali” entered the English language as a general noun rather than as a proper name.

Trilby is about five people: Taffy, Sandy, Little Billee, Trilby, and Svengali. Taffy, Sandy, and Little Billee are two Englishman and a Scotsman, living the bohemian lifestyle of artists in Paris. Trilby is a girl from the block and an artist’s model. (This being 1895, the job of artist’s model has certain negative connotations). Svengali is an evil musician with great mesmerist skill. Taffy, Sandy, and Little Billee, the heroes of the piece, are all in love with Trilby. But it is Svengali, the Jewish music teacher, who “wins” her, after a fashion. After Little Billee badgers Trilby into agreeing to marry him, Little Billee’s priggish mother forces the working class Trilby to admit that she is not good enough for Little Billee. Trilby leaves Paris, and Little Billee suffers from an epileptic seizure (“it ended in brain fever and other complications”¹) and returns to England. This ends the carefree bohemian life of Taffy, Sandy, and Little Billee. Five years later, Trilby reappears, now in thrall to Svengali and an internationally renowned singing sensation. Once she sees Little Billee, however, she snaps out of the trance in which Svengali put her. Svengali is attacked by his First Violin and then by his manservant, and he dies of heart disease. Trilby wastes away and Little Billee dies young, leaving the amiable Taffy and Sandy to live happily ever after.

Trilby is not very good at all. The most damning problem for the book is its rampant antisemitism. Although Du Maurier does throw in the occasional kind word for those of “Jewish blood,” most of the novel is filled with derogatory slurs about Jews and being Jewish. And Svengali himself is a rank antisemitic stereotype. If Trilby, as Jonathan Freedman says, “worked to delineate a new kind of audience response in which insecure readers avidly turned to high culture as a way of affirming their social status,”² its “representation of the Jew as sexual corrupter of innocent gentile women ascended to a virulent power at this moment in racial and cultural history.”³

Even apart from Du Maurier’s hatred of Jews, Trilby has other difficulties. Much of the dialogue is in untranslated French, and slangy French at that, which can be a trial for readers whose French is less than perfect. Du Maurier’s depiction of life in bohemian Paris is romanticized beyond the point of credibility. The tone Du Maurier tries to establish for the book–breezy, slangy, and conversational–grows increasingly affected and strained. Du Maurier attempts to make his characters free spirits, but too many of them are prigs, hamstrung by stolid middle-class Victorian morality. Trilby is far more attractive as a soiled dove than as the reformed, saccharine good girl. And some of the plot twists are, to be kind, hard to credit.

Svengali himself is a Gothic villain. He possess Trilby, so that even after she awakens from her years-long trance, he still has his claws in her soul, and her last words are his name. But Svengali lacks the joy of a good Gothic villain. He is wretched in addition to grasping, vain, greasy, salacious, greedy, wheedling, and cruel:

Such was Svengali--only to be endured for the sake of his music--always ready to vex, frighten, bully, or torment anybody or anything smaller and weaker than himself from a woman or a child to a mouse or a fly.⁴

Had Svengali really enjoyed his evil, he might have been a better villain, but as it is he is too unhappy, even when he is trotting Trilby around as his “wife,” to be a classic bad guy.

In an interesting passage later in the novel the terminally-ill Gecko describes Trilby as having two selves: one, the sweet, sympathetic woman loved by all who know her, and the other, the one under control of Svengali,

was just a singing-machine – an organ to play upon – an instrument of music – a Stradivarius – a flexible flageolet of flesh and blood – a voice, and nothing more – just the unconscious voice that Svengali sang with – for it takes two to sing like La Svengali, monsieur.⁵

Trilby as “un simulacre”⁶ can be interpreted as being dehumanized both in the typical way that Victorian men and Victorian writers dehumanized women and female characters, and in a way that ties in to the Fin-de-Siècle Unease:

Trilby’s fate in the novel is linked to a lifelong process of dehumanization that shatters her sense of autonomous self and reduces her to a most rudimentary version of the human. In her narrative progression from aspiring subject to tractable object, Trilby can, in fact, be positioned as belonging to the long cultural genealogy of the automaton, a genealogy that both predates and extends beyond the specific historical outlines of the Victorian formulation of mesmerism. In this light, Svengali and his mesmeric ability can be read as symptomatic, rather than causative, elements of Trilby’s transformation. Du Maurier’s novel, invested as it is in anxieties about will and agency at the Victorian fin de siècle, is thus linked to a larger nineteenth-century concern about the fate of human subjectivity in an increasingly rationalized, systematized world, and to the lengthy and continually evolving imaginative history of the automaton.⁷

¹ George Du Maurier, Trilby, volume 2 (London: Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1894), 55.

² Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 161.

³ Freedman, The Temple of Culture, 192.

⁴ George Du Maurier, Trilby, volume 1 (London: Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1894), 171.

⁵ Maurier, Trilby, volume three, 174.

⁶ Maurier, Trilby, volume three, 174.

⁷ Fiona Coll, “‘Just a Singing-Machine’: The Making of an Automaton in George Du Maurier’s Trilby,” University of Toronto Quarterly 79, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 743-744.