"Doctor Thorne" by Anthony Trollope

Doctor Thorne is the third in Trollope's Barsetshire series of novels coming after The Warden and Barchester Towers.

Doctor Thorne, a cousin of the grand Thornes of Ullathorne who appear in Barchester Towers, is a simple country daughter who lives with his niece Mary. Mary's parentage is mysterious, though as is usually with Trollope the mystery lasts no more than a few pages; I have never met any novelist more determined to give the game away. Mary's father was Doctor Thorne's rakish brother Henry who seduced and impregnated Roger Scatcherd's sister; as a result Roger, a stonemason and great drinker, bashed Henry to death (getting six months for manslaughter; who said modern courts were lenient!) and the mother got married and moved to America leaving the baby girl in the care of her uncle the doctor.

Roger Scatcherd's wife had also been wet nurse to Francis Gresham, son and heir of Greshambury.

Twenty one years on, Frank comes of age. He has more or less grown up with Mary around and he has fallen in love with her. But his family estate is burdened with debts. Already Roger Scatcherd, who has made a fortune post-prison as a railway magnate, has bought a significant portion of the estate and Frank's dad owes Roger another eighty thousand pounds or so. So Frank's family want him to marry money and stop making love to Mary. They (and everyone else except the Doctor who soon confides in Roger, now Sir Roger (Bart)) are unaware that Mary is potentially the heiress to Sir Roger's three hundred thousand pounds.

Frank is sent away to de Courcey Castle (despite protesting that he needs to go back to Cambridge where he is close to finishing his degree) to meet Miss Dunstable, heiress to the Oil of Lebanon fortune, who turns out to be a terrible funny, sensible girl who really likes Frank as a friend but, after he proposes to her, advises him to marry Mary. This proposal comes in the centre of the book and is, in one sense, the turning point. This is the growing up of Frank, the point from which his boyish passion is replaced by a manly love. From now on, although Frank will be tempted, we are sure that (with the repeated assistance of Miss Dunstable the good fairy) he will stay true to Mary.

The main tribulations seem to be around sending Frank away for varying periods of time and preventing communication between him and Mary (either deliberately or through the vagaries of the Post Office). At the start these 'cooling off periods' are necessary so that various other plot elements have time to come to fruition. Towards the end, when there is yet another fortnight delay, the aim seems merely to be to pad out the novel: was Trollope paid per word?

In the end, what we all knew was going to happen from the start happens and they all live happily ever after (except Augusta who is betrayed a second time in a rather nasty chapter that could easily be removed entirely from the narrative).

A fairy story with a bad witch, a good fairy, a young romantic hero, an ineffective Baron Hardup, and a sweet innocent Cinderella who is transformed from rags to riches. The only truly brilliant character is Miss Dunstable, a lady past her prime marrying age who nevertheless enjoys the attention of strings of would-be husbands on account of the Oil of Lebanon but who stays sane whilst being pursued by these unspeakables by having a brilliant sense of humour. Otherwise the characters are either too good to be true (Dr Thorne, Mary, Frank, Beatrice, the Squire, even Sir Roger, his wife etc) or pure villains such as Sir Louis and the avaricious and extravagant Lady Arabella.

Another Trollope. March 2016, 468 pages

I have also read and reviewed Trollope's Palliser novels:

• Can You Forgive Her? in which Alice Vavasor oscillates backwards and forwards between goody two shoes John Grey and her wicked cousin George Vavasor. This book is blessed with a humorous counterpoint as rich and merry widow Mrs Greenow oscillates between rich farmer Mr Cheesacre who repeatedly tells everyone how well to do he is and penniless chancer and fraud 'Captain' Bellfield; the funniest of the palliser books
• Phineas Finn, Irish charmer Phineas enters parliament and seeks marriage with Violet Effingham (he fights a duel over her) or Laura Standish (who rejects him for dour Scot Mr Kennedy whom Phineas subsequently saves from muggers) whilst being pursued by a poor Irish girl from home. Phineas suffers political tribulations but the best part of the book is the sadness over Laura's marriage.
• The Eustace Diamonds, The wonderful minx Lizzie Eustace, who has married a dying man for diamonds and is determined to keep them despite legal attempts to win them back for the family, is Trollope's best character. She lies, she manipulates and she breaks the law to retian what she has convinced herself is rightfully hers.
• Phineas Redux Phineas returns, is again embroiled in woman trouble, and stands trial for murder. This should be the most exciting of the Trollope books were it not for the fact that Trollope writres his own spoilers.
• The Prime Minister Plantagent Palliser, Duke of Omnium, becomes Prime Minister of a coalition but he is too concerned for his honour to be a successful leader and he struggles on the rack of his own conscience
• The Duke's Children in which Plantagenet's children do their best to make unsuitable matches. The Duke finds it hard to apply his own liberal principles to his children.

"Barchester Towers" by Anthony Trollope

The blurb on the back mentions Trollope's "matchless handling of plot" yet I have never known an author more prone to the spoiler! The plot such as it is revolves around the widow Bold and whether she will marry the odious Mr Slope or the feckless Bertie Stanhope or the saintly Reverend Arabin and since we are told at the end of chapter 15 (about a third of the way through) that she will marry neither Slope nor Stanhope (he excuses this spoiler by telling us that it can ruin one's enjoyment of a book if a previous reader tells you what is going to happen!!!!) we are left with the sub-plot which is will Mr Slope become Dean? Trollope spoils this too! At the beginning of Chapter 38 we are told that he has no chance to be Dean and yet Trollope wishes his characters to act as if they don't know this almost until the end of the book.

The other most obvious flaw with this book is the author's long-windedness: "Had she married Petruchio, it may be doubted whether that arch wife-tamer would have been able to keep her legs out of those garments which are presumed by men to be peculiarly unfitted for feminine use" (Ch 33) equals 'no-one was going to stop her wearing the trousers'. It's not just verbose, its verbosity obscures the meaning. The defence that he was paid by the page does not make this any higher quality as a work of art. 

The authorial voice frequently intrudes, often to discourse upon the craft of the novelist:

• "It would not be becoming were I to travestie a sermon, or even to repeat the language of it in the pages of a novel." (Ch 6)
• "Do I not myself know that I am at this moment in want of a dozen pages, and that I am sick of cudgelling my brains to find them." (Ch 51)
• "The end of a novel, like the end of a children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums." (Ch 53)

The author would usually rather tell than show, especially when it comes to explaining the motivations of his characters.

Names are important to Trollope. Some of them are nominative determinism run rampant: Mr and Mrs Quiverful have fourteen children, the bishop is Dr Proudie, the upwards-aspiring farmer's wife is Mrs Lookaloft.

It is hard to forgive Trollope for being such a snob. "Could Mr Slope ... even have learnt the ways of a gentleman, he might have risen to great things." (Ch 8) Slope is damned by his lower class origins, and this in a novel devoted to the Church! Slope himself is snobbish, suggesting that "for people of that class [lower class people who talk funny] the cathedral service does not appear to me to be the most useful"; they are to be excluded from the cathedral (Ch 12). The centrepiece of the great garden party given by the Thornes segregates the great from the humble and Mrs Lookaloft's flouting of these rules is one of the key moments in the centrepiece. In chapter 32, Slope receives information from Mrs Bold's maid-servant and Trollope comments: "Considering the source from whence this came it was not quite so untrue as might have been expected"; in plain English the author is telling us that the lower-classes are habitual liars. 

His characters are of the Dickensian sort, in that they are colourful and memorable and delightful but they are fundamentally caricatures with no complexity. There are the goodies, such as the impossibly saintly Mr Harding and the baddies such as the oleaginous Obadiah Slope (Urian Heep in a clerical collar). There are the more nuanced such as the wordly archdeacon or Mr Arabin who over-thinks everything, or Signora Neroni, the siren who delights in seduction but is psychologically acute and able to do someone a good turn (if it won't cost her). There are the forces of nature, such as Mrs Proudie, the Bishop's wife. All of the aforementioned are leopards who will never change their spots. Only two characters suggest the possibility of change: Bertie Stanhope (the young waster who is still too honourable to take advantage of a woman) and Mrs Bold.

Unfortunately, like Dickens, Trollope finds it much more difficult to create good characters. Septimus Harding, meek and mild milk sop hero of the previous book, The Warden, in this Barsetshire series, is too good to be true; Mr Arabin, virginal Fellow of an Oxford College who throws it all up to become a little parish priest, is likewise unflawed. At least Eleanor Bold, Harding's daughter, who goes on to marry Arabin (why should I care about spoilers when Trollope doesn't?), is stubborn and headstrong, especially when she is misunderstood. But Trollope is orchestrating a morality play rather than anything more visceral.

There is a little intertextual fun. In chapter 4, Mr Slope is said to be descended from Mr Slop, the physician who was present at the birth of Tristram Shandy (by Laurence Sterne), who argues with a servant called Obadiah, and whose ancestors must (since Slop was a Roman Catholic) have at some point changed their religion. There are lots of quotes and references to other works, especially the Bible and Shakespeare but also including Homer and Marlowe.

Basically, I thought it was poorly written. The plot contains spoilers, the prose is long-winded, and the characters have no progressions, they are almost all either goodies or baddies with little mixture of strengths and weakness, and they can all be summed up in a very few words, such as Bertie, the cad with an honourable heart.

The spoiled plot is a feature of Trollope novels (eg The Eustace Diamonds, and Phineas Redux). In  chapter 12 of his 1883 Autobiography, Trollope contrasts his 'realistic' novels with the 'sensationalist' novels of Wilkie Collins. "The readers who prefer the one are supposed to take delight in the elucidation of character. Those who hold by the other are charmed by the continuation and gradual development of a plot." Which would be all very well if Trollope's characters actually had character development but they don't.

But then how do I explain its huge popularity? At my reading group I was in a minority of one; the others all enjoyed the book. I think the difference was that I judged it as a novel, and they looked on it as an entertainment. They thought it gave a good description of the social issues of the time, which perhaps it does to an extent, and that it was funny. I hadn't thought of it as a comic novel. You can compare it with one of those classic BBC sitcoms such as 'Are You Being Served?' or 'Allo Allo', neither of which I liked or Fawlty Towers, which I loved. They use stock one-dimensional characters and poke fun at them. Barchester Towers is the same. It is satire and as satire, I suppose, it succeeds. But it is still too verbose and the plot is still self-sabotaged by the author. 

Selected quotes:

• "The undying fame promised to our friend was clearly intended to be posthumous." (Ch 2)
• "He understood well the value of forms, and knew that the due observance of rank could not be maintained unless the exterior trappings belonging to it were held in proper esteem." (Ch 3)
• "If honest men did not squabble for money, in this wicked world of ours, the dishonest men would get it all." (Ch 14)
• "I know no life that must be as delicious as that of a writer for newspapers ... to thunder forth accusations ... show up the worst side of everything ... pick holes in every coat, to be indignant, sarcastic, jocose, moral, or supercilious ... What can be so easy as this when the critic has to be responsible for nothing." (Ch 21)
• "A round dinner-table ... is the most abominable article of furniture that ever was invented." (Ch 21)
• "Everything has gone by, I believe. ... The cigar has been smoked out, and we are the ashes." (Ch 34)
• "Steel too highly polished, edges too sharp, do not do for this world's work." (Ch 38)
• "What men choose to do at Oxford, nobody ever hears of." (Ch 47) equals 'what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas'.
• "It is the bane of my life that on important subjects I acquire no fixed opinion. I think, and I think, and go on thinking." (Ch 48)

Not so much a novel as an entertainment. Perhaps its popularity comes from its predictability, its cosy context conjuring up a world where nothing really bad can happen, and its comforting certainties.

Unchallenging, poorly written, overlong and boring. But really quite funny. April 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

The series continues with Doctor Thorne, where I am heading next but without any expectation of more than a meander.

I have also read and reviewed Trollope's political Palliser novels:

• Can You Forgive Her? in which Alice Vavasor oscillates backwards and forwards between goody two shoes John Grey and her wicked cousin George Vavasor. This book is blessed with a humorous counterpoint as rich and merry widow Mrs Greenow oscillates between rich farmer Mr Cheesacre who repeatedly tells everyone how well to do he is and penniless chancer and fraud 'Captain' Bellfield; the funniest of the Palliser books
• Phineas Finn, Irish charmer Phineas enters parliament and seeks marriage with Violet Effingham (he fights a duel over her) or Laura Standish (who rejects him for dour Scot Mr Kennedy whom Phineas subsequently saves from muggers) whilst being pursued by a poor Irish girl from home. Phineas suffers political tribulations but the best part of the book is the sadness over Laura's marriage.
• The Eustace Diamonds, The wonderful minx Lizzie Eustace, who has married a dying man for diamonds and is determined to keep them despite legal attempts to win them back for the family, is Trollope's best character. She lies, she manipulates and she breaks the law to retian what she has convinced herself is rightfully hers.
• Phineas Redux Phineas returns, is again embroiled in woman trouble, and stands trial for murder. This should be the most exciting of the Trollope books were it not for the fact that Trollope writres his own spoilers.
• The Prime Minister Plantagent Palliser, Duke of Omnium, becomes Prime Minister of a coalition but he is too concerned for his honour to be a successful leader and he struggles on the rack of his own conscience
• The Duke's Children in which Plantagenet's children do their best to make unsuitable matches. The Duke finds it hard to apply his own liberal principles to his children.

"The Warden" by Anthony Trollope

This is the first of the Chronicles of Barsetshire, Trollope's clerical life series.

Septimus Harding, a meek and mild clergyman whose principle interest is early choral music and playing the cello, has been awarded wardenship of an almshouse, a sinecure worth £800 per annum. But this is so vastly more than the allowances of the old people who are the intended recipients of the almshouse charity that it is challenged by local radical doctor John Bold (who wants to marry Warden Harding's daughter) both legally and through the Thunderer national newspaper.

It is one quarter of the length of any one of Trollope's political books which make it a neat enough novella. If you can forgive the repeated intrusion of the author's own voice in telling his story, and the use of comic names, this book does enjoy the character of the Archdeacon, who is the Bishop's son and Mr Harding's son in law, who bullies his father (whom he calls 'My Lord') and his father-in-law; they are both rather comically afraid of him. But he is almost the only nuanced character. Mr Harding is depressingly goody-goody, the Bishop almost vacuous in his ineffectiveness, and the journalist a stock baddy. The women are rather better being more conflicted but the outcome is that you never feel that Mr Harding will not resolve his dilemma honourably, the only real question being how much he will be made to suffer the consequences.

And in a story about the conscience of a man it is sad to see that the noble and honourable Warden Harding hardly considers poor people. For him, religion is about singing in church. He is more than happy to take the income as awarded to him. And, most damningly, when he considers resigning the wardenship he thinks he can move to his country parish which at the moment is administered by his curate who supports a family on the income from the parish. If Harding moves, the curate will lose his job. This does not worry Harding in the slightest.

A small book (short by Trollope's standards) with some interesting details about clerical life in the early Victorian era.

In 2015, it was voted best book since 1797 by customers of Hatchards bookshop in Piccadilly which says a lot about customers of Hatchards. Fundamentally this is a thin novel lacking in complex characters but fundamentally cosy and reassuring for those with a conservative cast of mind.

November 2015; 169 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

I have also read and reviewed Trollope's political Palliser novels:

• Can You Forgive Her? in which Alice Vavasor oscillates backwards and forwards between goody two shoes John Grey and her wicked cousin George Vavasor. This book is blessed with a humorous counterpoint as rich and merry widow Mrs Greenow oscillates between rich farmer Mr Cheesacre who repeatedly tells everyone how well to do he is and penniless chancer and fraud 'Captain' Bellfield; the funniest of the palliser books
• Phineas Finn, Irish charmer Phineas enters parliament and seeks marriage with Violet Effingham (he fights a duel over her) or Laura Standish (who rejects him for dour Scot Mr Kennedy whom Phineas subsequently saves from muggers) whilst being pursued by a poor Irish girl from home. Phineas suffers political tribulations but the best part of the book is the sadness over Laura's marriage.
• The Eustace Diamonds, The wonderful minx Lizzie Eustace, who has married a dying man for diamonds and is determined to keep them despite legal attempts to win them back for the family, is Trollope's best character. She lies, she manipulates and she breaks the law to retian what she has convinced herself is rightfully hers.
• Phineas Redux  Phineas returns, is again embroiled in woman trouble, and stands trial for murder. This should be the most exciting of the Trollope books were it not for the fact that Trollope writres his own spoilers.
• The Prime Minister Plantagent Palliser, Duke of Omnium, becomes Prime Minister of a coalition but he is too concerned for his honour to be a successful leader and he struggles on the rack of his own conscience
• The Duke's Children in which Plantagenet's children do their best to make unsuitable matches. The Duke finds it hard to apply his own liberal principles to his children.

"The Duke's Children" by Anthony Trollope

This is the sixth and final instalment of the political Palliser series of novels which started with Can You Forgive Her? and continued through Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux and The Prime Minister.

At the very start of the book the delightful, charismatic Lady Glencora Palliser, Duchess of Omnium, dies. Given that she is so central to a number of the other books, this feels as if Trollope has decided to tie one hand behind his back; it is like the Forsyte Saga without Irene. She leaves a devastated husband, the Duke, most recently Prime Minister, and three grown up children: Lord Silverbridge who has been sent down from Oxford and intends to enter Parliament as a Conservative MP (the Pallisers have always been Liberal); he owns racehorses and is apt to lose huge sums of money gambling; Lady Mary who, with all the stubbornness of her mother, has decided to marry an impoverished commoner; and Lord Gerald who is in the process of being sent down from Cambridge. The story is mainly about Silverbridge who gets into scrapes and scandals of which the chief is his desire to marry an unsuitable woman.

As always with Trollope, true love succeeds if you are rich enough. If you are poor you can expect a lifetime of sexual frustration.

As always with Trollope, the lower classes are cads and bounders and generally come to a bad end. If a man drops his aitches he might as well go straight to prison.

As always with Trollope, he provides his own spoilers. One of the most charming chapters is the one in which he explains that most authors like to start a narrative in media res (in the middle of things) but he feels that this is to put the cart before the horse. He tries it, but is constitutionally unable to refrain from putting the horse first. All of his massive novels start slowly for the very reason that he must build up the details: he is painstaking but unfortunately the pains he is giving are the reader's.

He is also unable to remember all the details. This novel shows all the sings of having been written very fast and not edited. Thus Tregear denies having a sister in chapter 4 but by chapter 55 has acquired an elder sister.

It is a good book, on the whole, and Silverbridge is a charming youth with whose weaknesses and vacillations I very much sympathised. The bulk of the tension is whether the femme fatale will get her hooks into him and make him marry her before he can achieve true love. She is a very unsympathetic portrait although her schemes are intitally thwarted by herself because she cannot bear to be bad. In contrast, Silverbridge is a true gentlemen.

There was a moment of humour when Popplewell tries to court Miss Bonnaseen but far less than in other books. Most of it is the same plot of all the Palliser novels, recycled yet again.

October 2015; 506 pages

"The Prime Minister" by Anthony Trollope

This is the fifth in Trollope's 'Palliser' series of political novels, following on from:

• Can You Forgive Her?
• Phineas Finn
• The Eustace Diamonds
• Phineas Redux

Once again it stars the wonderfully wayward Lady Glencora, now the Duchess of Omnium, and her husband the Duke, who used to be Plantagenet Palliser when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and has now been kicked upstairs into the Other Place. It also features Irish adventurer MP Phineas Finn and that splendid little minx Lady Eustace.

But the plot revolves around Emily Wharton and her perverse attempt to marry Ferdinand Lopez. Emily's father opposes the match on the grounds that Lopez is not an English gentleman and that too little is known of his antecedents. It is taken for granted that Lopez, who keeps a coach and pairs and is known to banker Mills Happerton, is wealthy although no one can say where the source of his wealth resides. But Emily is obstinate and gets her own way, with predictable consequences. Lopez immediately puts pressure on Emily to extract money from her barrister father so he can keep his rather dodgy speculations afloat.

There are predictable consequences. Emily and her family are tormented by the unscrupulous blackguard. In the end, the rascal is ruined, together with his rather lower class business partner; Lopez commits suicide. Emily is free to marry her original love, the suitable boy next door but she, feeling herself defiled and worthless by her contact with the rogue, is determined to stay a widow in perpetual self-punishment.

I've spoiled it. But Trollope doesn't seem to be interested in suspense. In Phineas Redux, which revolves around a murder, he tells us whodunnit almost as soon as the crime is committed. and in this book there are no surprises. Lopez, characterised as a villain from the start, is a villain. His suicide happens three quarters of the way through the book, leaving a full quarter for the loose ends to be resolved.

In fairness, there is a second plot which is intertwined with the first. The Duke of Omnium, Plantagenet Palliser, becomes Prime Minister of a coalition government. Lady Glencora is in her element, arranging massive house parties. But the Duke hates it. He is too honourable for politics, particularly the sometimes messy task of keeping a coalition together. He is far too thin-skinned; once the People's Banner gets his knife into him he squirms with every word. He can't even smile at people and the parties Glencora organises are often without him, the star attraction, because he is working quietly in his study. It is this exploration of character that Trollope is most interested in. But without the Lopez story, the book would be very heavy and slow. Like all the others, it is 80 chapters long. By his uneven plotting, Trollope undermines the momentum of his book and leaves some parts very slow indeed.

It is also a vehicle for Trollope, who probably thought he was a great liberal reformer, to parade his class snobbery and casual racism.

The Palliser series is concluded in The Duke's Children in which the Duke's political beliefs are tersted when his children threaten to make unsuitable marriages.

Beautifully written, great characters but some bits drag out interminably. October 2015; 691 pages

"Phineas Redux" by Anthony Trollope

This is the fourth of the Palliser series of novels which has already included:

• Can You Forgive Her?
• Phineas Finn in which we first meet the hero of this book
• The Eustace Diamonds in which the little liar Lizzie Eustace is very naughty about a very precious set of diamonds

The fifth book, The Prime Minister, is also on this blog as is the final book, The Duke's Children in which the Duke finds it difficult to apply his political principles to his own family when his children threaten to make non-ducal marriages.

In some ways Phineas Redux is the most exciting of the books. At its heart is a murder trial. Trollope issues a spoiler almost as soon as the crime is committed by declaring who is innocent and who is guilty; by doing this he forfeits a great deal of possible dramatic tension. But he did that in The Eustace Diamonds as well. (It is a deliberate failing: in chapter 12 of his Autobiography (1883), Trollope contrasts his 'realistic' novels with the 'sensationalist' novels of Wilkie Collins. "The readers who prefer the one are supposed to take delight in the elucidation of character. Those who hold by the other are charmed by the continuation and gradual development of a plot." Which would be all very well if Trollope's characters actually had character development but they don't.) When it comes to the question of who Phineas Finn, handsome MP, will marry, Trollope draws this out as far as he can; it isn't settled until chapter 79 out of 80. Trollope can do tension but he only seems to be interested in who will marry whom.

And in fox hunting. He loves fox hunting. Every book so far has had a fox hunting scene. Perhaps it is the only real opportunity for his characters to escape the stuffy drawing rooms and the strictly controlled speech in favour of wildness and excitement. But Newgate Prison is a pretty uncontrolled environment too (although the cell in this case is carpeted with bed, chairs and two tables, books and writing materials, and plenty of good food; what it was to be rich and on remand.

Trollope also continues to show his casual anti-semitism in his appalling treatment of Mr Emilius, a man who seems to have no saving grace whatsoever. At least he seemed nice in The Eustace Diamonds. Trollope's other weakness is in the relentless defence of a class system in which the affairs of idle young gentlemen whose private income makes them go into debt with tradesmen and who can't marry because they are too poor (but much richer than the servants) are so much more interesting than anything a lower class person might do.

But is this book any good?

It is, of course, a soap opera and like any soap opera it is more believable when you have met the characters elsewhere. Trollope has some very believable characters and his women in particular are superb: Lady Glencora is a magnificently spoilt little rich girl become manipulative society hostess whose very house is named Matching in honour of her dating agency work; Madame Max is much more mysterious but still a nicely rounded character. I enjoyed Adelaide Palliser, a forthright young girl, who is courted by the smitten but dreadful Ned Spooner and puts him down brilliantly. And Plantagent Palliser is a wonderful dry stick of a cabinet minister. But Phineas annoyed me: he had such scruples and allowed his emotions to blow him that way and this; he didn't deserve a happy ending.

But the crucial test is whether this book kept me reading. Again there are passages I skipped and Trollope would have benefited from some severe pruning. There were sections, especially at the start, when things were a little slow and the gentle comedy was all that was available to help. The actual murder does not take place until the second volume, over half way through the book. After that the book fairly zips along, despite the spoilers, until the end when it takes a little while to wrap up. So good characters, mostly good dialogue and a plot that is good in parts. Worth a read.

September 2015; 569 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Eustace Diamonds" by Anthony Trollope

This is the third in the Palliser series of novels (it follows Can You Forgive Her? and Phineas Finn and precedes Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, and The Duke's Children) but it stands alone, although there are occasional appearances by characters from the other novels and you might not want to read them out of order in case you discovered who married whom which would be a bit of a spoiler.

Lizzie Greystock is a scheming, lying minx who persuades Lord Eustace to marry her; he soon dies having fathered a son. She is left the income (£4,000) from the Scottish estate for life and, so she claims, a £10,000 diamond necklace. But lawyers for the estate claim that the necklace is an heirloom. All is set for a legal battle in which possession is nine-tenths of the law.

She also wants to marry again, to gain a protector. She catches penniless Lord Faun in her wiles but he then wants to withdraw from the engagement because of the potential scandal about the necklace. So she then sets her cap at her cousin, barrister and MP (and also penniless) Frank Greystock. But he has pledged himself to governess Lucy Morris though all his friends tell him that he must break off this engagement because he cannot afford to marry on his barrister's income whilst still having the expenses that accrue to an MP (unpaid in these days). Every man who comes close to Lizzie is captivated by her beauty and turned inside out by her verbal dexterity in which she recasts all their honourable motives as bad and makes them believe that the only thing that they can do is to marry her; if she will have them.

The legal complexities surrounding whether the necklace could have been a gift, and the will-he-won't-he surrounding Lizzie and her two lovers make up the essence of the plot on the long-winded first half od the novel.

About half way through the book, after a typically Trollopian invocation of the joys of fox-hunting (he was a keen hunter and liked to include a scene about hunting in every novel), we meet a set of penniless adventures Lord George, Sir Griffin, Mrs Carbuncle and her daughter Lucinda Roanoke, and the preacher Mr Emilius. With the arrival of this crew the story really takes off and the plot begins to develop. The second half of the book is more like a thriller in the style of Wilkie Collins while the first half was a very slow social comedy with a plot worthy of Jane Austen.

As with Austen, we are entirely within the world of gentility. The novel depends for much of its tension on whether Lord Faun or Frank Greystock will behave like gentlemen according to their code of honour. There is comedy when Frank inadvertently rides the horse of a merchant. The lower classes are either clowns or crooks. And Lizzie's wickedness stems from the way she uses her position as a lady to get away with lying (she is believed by a jury even after she admits lying on oath on a previous occasion) and, perhaps, with stealing.

Trollope exposes his anti-Semitic prejudices. Moneylenders are repeatedly associated with Jews and Mr Emilius is suspect despite being a Church of England preacher because he is suspected of Jewish roots: "the fashionable foreign ci-devant Jew preacher"; "The man was a nasty, greasy, lying, squinting Jew preacher"; he has a "hooky nose". These were, of course, the prejudices of Trollope's age and social context (as were the anti-lower class prejudices noted above) amd therefore can be explained and understood, if not necessarily pardoned. But it does reflect badly on this novel as a work of art, because the use of stereotypical characters is lazy writing (and lazy thinking).

The central character of Lizzie, a clever but manipulative woman who is transparently awful while at the same time being hypnotically alluring, fundamentally a heroine who believes her own lies, who thinks she is much put upon, forced to fight for what is rightfully hers, is excellent. Frank, the hero, is another complex character: a man who knows what he wants to do to secure his long-term happiness but is too weak not to be repeatedly tempted by Lizzie and by the general opinions of his class of society. Another good character is Lord Fawn, who wants to please everybody and, of course, ends up pleasing no-one. Mr Emilius, despite his unpleasantness, is sexually magnetic. Trollope can draw characters with strengths and weaknesses. But Lucy Morris is much too good to be true and most of the minor characters, such as kind Lady Fawn ("known as a miracle of Virtue, Benevolence, and Persistency"; Ch 3), or cross Lady Linlithgow, or conscientious Mr Camperdown, are one dimensional.

I first read this book in August 2015 and I enjoyed it. Trollope is still popular among today's genteel middle classes who form a, important part of the reading public. Why? Reading it again in July 2023, I find that Trollope is hugely flawed:

• The first half is too long and too dry. The second half rattles along. Although, in terms of pacing, the principal turning point occurs almost exactly half way through, the slowness of the first half compared to the second unbalances the pace of the book.
• He desperately needed an editor. Not only does he write at far too much length, but there are errors:
• Frank Greystock is over thirty and simultaneously nearly thirty;
• one of the key points of the plot hinges on whether the diamonds were taken from the jewellers in Scotland on 4th September or in London on 24th September but Trollope tells us that Lizzie's honeymoon lasted six weeks in Scotland which meant that she couldn't have been in London until mid-October making this key point, repeatedly mentioned, irrelevant;
• in chapter 24 we are told that there are only "a few stunted trees around" Portray Castle because trees don't prosper but earlier Lizzie had been accused of cutting down a forest of old oaks.
• Trollope writes using the omniscient point of view. The narrator's voice repeatedly intrudes from time to time:
• "Although the first two chapters of this new history have been devoted to the fortunes and personal attributes of Lady Eustace, the historian begs his readers not to believe that that opulent and aristocratic Becky Sharp is to assume the dignity of heroine in the forthcoming pages." (CHAPTER 3 Lucy Morris)
• "the poor narrator has been driven to expend his four first chapters in the mere task of introducing his characters. He regrets the length of these introductions, and will now begin at once the action of his story." (CHAPTER 4 Frank Greystock)
• The intrusion of the author can be done with great effect. It can be Brechtian, reminding the reader that it is just a story. It can be a way of adding humour; Henry Fielding in Tom Jones does this. It can comment on the action. Trollope doesn't seem to have any coherent reason for his intrusions. It just adds words.
• The concept of suspense seems alien to Trollope. The diamonds have vanished so Trollope immediately tells us where they are because "The chronicler states this at once, as he scorns to keep from his reader any secret that is known to himself." In chapter 12 of his Autobiography (1883), Trollope contrasts his 'realistic' novels with the 'sensationalist' novels of Wilkie Collins. "The readers who prefer the one are supposed to take delight in the elucidation of character. Those who hold by the other are charmed by the continuation and gradual development of a plot." Which would be all very well if Trollope's characters actually had character development but they don't.
• Trollope repeatedly flouts the dictum 'show, don't tell'. He shows and then he tells. From his omniscient narrator's point of view, he tells us the innermost thoughts of each of his principal characters. He describes their characters at length, in almost as much detail as he describes their physical characteristics. He leaves almost nothing to the reader's imagination. And if you haven't got it the first time round, he tells you again. And again.

And perhaps this is the secret of his success. The reader doesn't have to do any work. Thus, Trollope is accessible to all. He is the fiction equivalent of easy listening. You can just let Trollope waft over you. And, nowadays at least, because he is a Victorian novelist and therefore regarded as highbrow, you can claim literary bragging rights for having read him. But he wrote 47 novels and most of them were long: never mind the quality, count the quantity is a maxim that springs to mind.

At my U3A 'The English Novel' book group, we were asked to compare Lizzie Eustace with Becky Sharp, the bad-girl protagonist of Thackeray's Vanity Fair; Trollope himself makes this comparison. There is a difference. Becky Sharp was always a penniless chancer whereas Lizzie's post-widowhood crimes were committed even though she was comfortably off; Becky was eventually punished by society, being forced into poverty-stricken exile abroad, while Lizzie retired to a very comfortable Scottish seclusion. 

We also learned that Trollope's mother was a prolific writer. We were told she wrote 114 books. Wikipedia itself only claims "over 100 volumes" (some books were published in multi-volume format) and lists 34 novels and 7 non-fiction works written between 1832 (when Mrs T was already in her 50s) and 1856 which gives a galloping rate of nearly two every year. Trollope set himself the target of writing 40 pages per week, about 10,000 words (I try to write 7,000 words per week but the majority of those don't make it into the final version). This is why, I believe, Trollope's work is careless, unstructured and paradoxically lazy: he simply didn't have time to create properly rounded minor characters from social strata witch which he was unacquainted. 

Selected Quotes:

• "It was admitted by all her friends, and also by her enemies – who were in truth the more numerous and active body of the two – that Lizzie Greystock had done very well with herself." (CHAPTER 1 Lizzie Greystock)
• "Admiral Greystock ... was a man who liked whist, wine – and wickedness in general we may perhaps say, and whose ambition it was to live every day of his life up to the end of it. People say that he succeeded, and that the whist, wine, and wickedness were there, at the side even of his dying bed." (CHAPTER 1 Lizzie Greystock)
• "It was a new pleasure, and one which, though he had ridiculed it, he had so often coveted." (CHAPTER 1 Lizzie Greystock)
• "she had no idea what her money would do, and what it would not" (CHAPTER 2 Lady Eustace)
• "They were long, large eyes – but very dangerous. To those who knew how to read a face, there was danger plainly written in them." (CHAPTER 2 Lady Eustace)
• "How few there are among women, few perhaps also among men, who know that the sweetest, softest, tenderest, truest eyes which a woman can carry in her head are green in colour!" (CHAPTER 2 Lady Eustace)
• "it is nicer to be born to £10,000 a year than to have to wish for £500." (CHAPTER 3 Lucy Morris)
• "Her light-brown hair was soft and smooth and pretty. As hair it was very well, but it had no speciality." (CHAPTER 3 Lucy Morris)
• "It frequently happens with men that they fail to analyse these things, and do not make out for themselves any clear definition of what their feelings are or what they mean. We hear that a man has behaved badly to a girl, when the behaviour of which he has been guilty has resulted simply from want of thought." (CHAPTER 4 Frank Greystock)
• "His father was a fine old Tory of the ancient school, who thought that things were going from bad to worse, but was able to live happily in spite of his anticipations." (CHAPTER 4 Frank Greystock)
• "To have been always in the right, and yet always on the losing side; always being ruined, always under persecution from a wild spirit of republican-demagogism – and yet never to lose anything, not even position, or public esteem, is pleasant enough. A huge, living, daily increasing grievance that does one no palpable harm, is the happiest possession that a man can have." (CHAPTER 4 Frank Greystock)
• "There is, probably, no man who becomes naturally so hard in regard to money as he who is bound to live among rich men, who is not rich himself, and who is yet honest." (CHAPTER 9 Showing what the Miss Fawns Said, and what Mrs Hittaway Thought)
• "he was slow and could not think and hear at the same time." (CHAPTER 10 Lizzie and her Lover)
• "She looks like a beautiful animal that you are afraid to caress for fear it should bite you" (CHAPTER 12 I Only Thought Of It)
• "The only doubt might be whether paste diamonds might not better suit her character." (CHAPTER 17 The Diamonds are Seen in Public)
• "To be alone with the girl to whom he is not engaged, is a man’s delight; – to be alone with the man to whom she is engaged is the woman’s." (CHAPTER 18 And I Have Nothing to Give)
• "But I get into debt, unfortunately; and as for other men’s wives, I am not sure that I may not do even that some day." (CHAPTER 19 As My Brother)
• "The quickness with which she sprung from her position, and the facility with which she composed not her face only, but the loose lock of her hair and all her person, for the reception of the coming visitor, was quite marvellous." (CHAPTER 19 As My Brother)
• "As a house it was not particularly eligible, the castle form of domestic architecture being exigeant in its nature and demanding that space, which in less ambitious houses can be applied to comfort, shall be surrendered to magnificence." (CHAPTER 21 ‘Ianthe’s Soul’)
• "as the world goes now, young widows are not miserable" (CHAPTER 21 ‘Ianthe’s Soul’)
• "It is pleasant to win in a fight; – but to be always fighting is not pleasant." (CHAPTER 21 ‘Ianthe’s Soul’)
• "that strong indignation at injustice which the unjust always feel when they are injured." (CHAPTER 23 Frank Greystock’s First Visit to Portray)
• "It is the debauched broken drunkard who should become a teetotaller, and not the healthy hard-working father of a family who never drinks a drop of wine till dinnertime." (CHAPTER 24 Showing what Frank Grey stock thought about Marriage)
• "The outside world to them was a world of pretty, laughing, ignorant children; and lawyers were the parents, guardians, pastors and masters by whom the children should be protected from the evils incident to their childishness." (CHAPTER 28 Mr Dove in his Chambers)
• "When you have your autumn holiday in hand to dispose of it, there is nothing more aristocratic that you can do than to go to Scotland. Dukes are more plentiful there than in Pall Mall, and you will meet an earl or at least a lord on every mountain." (CHAPTER 32 Mr and Mrs Hittaway in Scotland)
• "how, my lord, would you, who are giving hundreds, more than hundreds, for this portrait of your dear one, like to see it in print from the art critic of the day, that she is a brazen-faced hoyden who seems to have had a glass of wine too much, or to have been making hay?" (CHAPTER 35 Too Bad For Sympathy)
• "With whom are we to sympathize? says the reader, who not unnaturally imagines that a hero should be heroic." (CHAPTER 35 Too Bad For Sympathy)
• "He had not eyes clear enough to perceive that his cousin was a witch whistling for a wind, and ready to take the first blast that would carry her and her broomstick somewhere into the sky." (CHAPTER 35 Too Bad For Sympathy)
• "The nothing with which the dean had hitherto been contented had always included every comfort of life, a well-kept table, good wine, new books, and canonical habiliments with the gloss still on; but as the Bobsborough tradesmen had, through the agency of Mrs Greystock, always supplied him with these things as though they came from the clouds, he really did believe that he had never asked for anything." (CHAPTER 35 Too Bad For Sympathy)
• "For five minutes, during which everybody else was speaking to everybody – for five minutes, which seemed to her to be an hour, Lizzie spoke to no one, and no one spoke to her." (CHAPTER 37 Lizzie’s First Day)
• "I’m not a man who does things without thinking; and when I have thought I don’t want to think again." (CHAPTER 41 ‘Likewise the Bears in Couples Agree’)
• "We never know where each other’s shoes pinch each other’s toes." (CHAPTER 54 ‘I Suppose I May Say A Word’)
• "Perhaps, on the whole, more power is lost than gained by habits of secrecy." (CHAPTER 57 Humpty Dumpty)
• "pleasures should never be made necessities, when the circumstances of a gentleman’s life may perhaps require that they shall be abandoned for prolonged periods." (CHAPTER 57 Humpty Dumpty)
• "You may knock about a diamond, and not even scratch it; whereas paste in rough usage betrays itself" (CHAPTER 65 Tribute)
• "There was a twang in his voice which ought to have told her that he was utterly untrustworthy. There was an oily pretence at earnestness in his manner which ought to have told that he was not fit to associate with gentlemen." (CHAPTER 66 The Aspirations of Mr Emilius)
• "Mrs Carbuncle was much too strong, and had fought her battle with the world much too long, to regard such word-pelting as that." (CHAPTER 73 Lizzie’s Last Lover) Love word-pelting
• "A man, to be a man in her eyes, should be able to swear that all his geese are swans; – should be able to reckon his swans by the dozen, though he have not a feather belonging to him, even from a goose’s wing." (CHAPTER 73 Lizzie’s Last Lover)
• "I never was so sick of anything in my life as I am of Lady Eustace." (CHAPTER 80 What Was Said About It All At Matching)

July 2023; lots and lots of pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Phineas Finn" by Anthony Trollope

This is the second of Trollope's political 'Palliser' novels and forms a stand-alone sequel to Can You Forgive Her?

Phineas Finn, the son of an Irish doctor, training to be a barrister in London, is encouraged to become an MP. Unfortunately he has no money. This is a double problem since MPs are unwaged and since it costs them money to fight an election. Fortunately he finds a rotten borough which is in the gift of a Lord and is elected to that; his father pays him an allowance to survive. The obvious solution is to find a rich woman to marry; he becomes friendly with several. However, each of the ladies to whom he is attracted has other suitors one of whom pips him to the post and another challenges him to a duel. Through all of this he has to learn parliamentary business and face the ordeal of giving a maiden speech. But he prospers and is chosen to become a very junior minister (unfortunately this requires him to resign his seat and then stand in it again which costs him more money). Through all of this a Reform Bill is being enacted and he votes to disenfranchise the rotten borough he represents (he does this twice eventually).

Truly the path of becoming an MP when you are penniless and of marrying a suitable woman whom you actually love is not easy!

A standard, if long-winded, Victorian romance distinguished by the character of Violet Effingham who mercilessly teases her guardian aunt and who refuses to marry without being in love. As in Can You Forgive Her? there is a woman who is trying to manipulate her best friend into marrying her brother, a rather unsuitable and violent man, and there is a woman who marries for money and regrets it. The sadness of this marriage is very well portrayed although it would be nice if the dour Scot of a husband had some redeeming features.

I have a couple of niggles. Some incidents seem to come out of the blue. Phineas contracts a debt on behalf of a friend; this hangs over his head for some time making a nice pressure on him; then it is suddenly paid. An incident with some garrotters enables Phineas to save the life of a colleague; this is not fully exploited. Finally, about half way through and at a point when Phineas doesn't really need it, he inherits money which he then invests. But this is then forgotten when he has subsequent money troubles. It could have kept him going for some time but it lies unnoticed in a bank account.

On the other hand, Trollope really surprised me with his views which I hadn't expected in a Victorian, even one of a Whiggish/ Radical persuasion:

• "How can there be honour in what comes ... by chance? ... Honour comes from the mode of winning it."
• "I am not saying that people are equal; but that the tendency of all law-making ... should be to reduce the inequalities."
• "The wish of every honest man should be to assist in lifting up those below him"

Trollope write a lot of books and he wrote quickly and this isn't great literature. But it is a good story, well told. June 2015; 873 pages

Also on this blog:

• The next book in the series is about the scheming, lying minx Lizzie Eustace, a great character: The Eustace Diamonds
• Phineas Redux: when Phineas returns to parliament and is tried for murder
• The Prime Minister: another mugging in Hyde Park, another unscrupulous foreign adventurer seducing another English gentlewoman for her father's money
• The Duke's Children: in which the children of Mr Palliser, now the Duke of Omnium, threraten to make yet more unsuitable marriages and test whether he can actually apply his Liberal principles to his own family. 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Can you forgive her?" by Anthony Trollope

The strange thing about the title of this first of Trollope's six Palliser novels is that it is quite easy to forgive Alice for her oscillating back and forth between two possible husbands (which is what Trollope wants you to forgive in her) but much less easy to forgive her for her hypocritical puritanical prudery. But I am getting ahead of myself.

This story revolves around three women (and Trollope is far better than Dickens at portraying real women).

• Alice Vavasor can't decide whether to marry goody two shoes John Grey (there is a point at which Alice's father says that he thinks it is John's goodness that irks Kate and I nodded in agreement at this point) or scarred villain (straight out of melodrama) George Vavasor, her wicked cousin. George is busy ruining himself in his ambition to become an MP for a Metropolitan seat; the costs of the election are far beyond his means and he becomes increasingly wicked in his efforts to obtain money.
• Lady Glencora wanted to marry handsome but impecunious devil Burgo Fitzgerald with whom she was head over heels in love but her important relations pressurised her into marrying dry stick MP Plantagenet Palliser, heir to the Duke of Omnium and a likely candidate to be the next Chancellor of the Exchequer. But Burgo keeps tempting her to run away with him and she is very unhappy in her marriage and contemplating ruining her reputation by becoming Burgo's mistress.
• Mrs Greenow, Alice's Aunt and a wealthy widow, flirts with Mr Cheesacre, a rich farmer who can never avoid telling everyone how well-to-do he is and penniless and mendacious soldier 'Captain' Bellfield. This story ends differently from the other two and gives the novel a welcome counterpoint of comedy; a lot of humour is wrung from the rivalry of Cheesacre and Bellfield, particularly from the pretensions of the former.

So, the eternal dilemma for all women: bad boy to have fun with or nice boy for security?

This is a very weighty book. 770 pages takes commitment! But Trollope can write some brilliant nuanced characters (apart from Alice who is a pious pain in the posterior). Lady Glencora is a delight as a spoilt little heiress who chatters away endlessly, has tantrums, refuses to like people she dislikes (and tells them to their faces) and just longs to be naughty. I adored the trip with Plantagenet in which she opposes everyhting he proposes, just for the devilment of being awkward. George is a delight as he plans more and more moustache-twirling evil (whilst never straying too far from the paths of credibility) in his desperation to raise money: I particularly love his self-hatred as he is driven into the depths. Mr Palliser is a delight as he gradually becomes more and more human; at the start he has impeccable courtesy, he is dedicated to his politics and he is ridiculously honourable but before the end his sacrifices and sufferings have made him considerate (as opposed to just courteous) and thoughtful. Alice's father, widowed when Alice was a baby, resents having to work in the Court of Chancery signing papers for three days a week during term time for £800 per year (£500 pa is enough for a comfortable private income) but will not relinquish the job for a pension of £400 pa; he dines at his club every night so that Alice seems to have brought herself up. Lady Macleod keeps talking about the 'advantage' of knowing and being even distantly related to the nobility. And Mr Cheesacre, as I have written above, is a most marvellous comic creation.

There are moments of wonderfully dry humour. After Glencora's first trip to a casino, when Mr Palliser was very angry at Alice for allowing her to go, he agrees to accompany her a second time, at which Alice looks at him and says to Lady G: "Perhaps I shall be forgiven when someone sees how difficult it is to manage you."

It is well-plotted too. The first part of the novel is a little slow but once we have got the measure of the characters their intermingled stories keeps things going. There are 40 chapters in each of two volumes and almost every chapter has a neat dramatic arc. And the Greenow/ Cheesacre/ Bellfield comedy leavens the dough considerably. There were certainly moments when I didn't know what was going to happen next and could scarcely wait to find out.

Trollope wrote 47 novels (and other work)!!!! I have read The Warden, first in the Barsetshire tales of clerical sheenanigans, and now this. I enjoyed The Warden and now I very much want to read the rest of the Palliser series. Great fun. May 2015; 770 pages

I have now read and enjoyed the next books in the series:

• Phineas Finn: a poor Irishman becomes an MP and tries to marry money to support this career
• The Eustace Diamonds: Scheming, lying minx Lizzie Eustace tries to hang on to her diamonds and trap a second husband; a great female character
• Phineas Redux: Phineas is tried for murder; Trollope writes his own spoiler and forfeits lots of possible tension.
• The Prime Minister: Mr Palliser, now the Duke of Omnium, becomes Prime Minister and yet another scoundrel marries yet another gentlewoman; perhaps this book has the greatest rotter but again Trollope forfeits a great deal of tension by resolving the main plot too early.
• The Duke's Children: Two of Mr Palliser's children threaten to make unsuitable marriages; will the Duke allow them?

But of all the books, Can You Forgive Her? has the best comic scenes.

"Second honeymoon" by Joanna Trollope

When actress Edie's last child leaves home she gets a dose of empty nest blues. On the other hand, husband Russell (a theatrical agent) looks forward to discovering his wife again. So when his daughter Rosa gets the sack and finds herself in debt and asks to come home he says no. Then elder son Matt breaks up with high-powered business woman girlfriend Ruth and returns home, Edie gets cast in an Ibsen play and offers her son on stage a room in her house and soon the house is full again. But a house full of resentful rent-paying adults isn't quite as comfortable as a family home and tensions rise.

Essentially a well written Mills and Boon saga without the muscles and heaving bosoms and with one or two of the characters nicely drawn. It lacks depth but it certainly kept me turning the pages.

June 2012; 382 pages