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This chapter contends that while the verbal content of novels forces readers to empathize with other minds, the material heft of the book allows them to block each other out. Moreover, the unrepresentability of reading becomes a proxy for the incredibility of selfhood. The wedge that novels drive between the outside of books and the interiority of readers, or between material cover and verbal content, forces the genre to choose between describing the look of reading and its feel. In coding the handling of books as authentic and the reading of texts as a front, Anthony Trollope's comedies of manners upstage textually occasioned absorption by bibliographically assisted repulsion; but, more crucially, they abdicate any attempt to plumb psychological depths. Whenever the novel juxtaposes competing vocabularies in which to describe a printed object, it stages questions about the relation of the inner life to the object world.

The newer Irish land novel of the 1840s and beyond was different from what had gone before inasmuch as it essentially charted a struggle, both ideological and physical, between landlords and tenants for the future of the land. Ironically, this was pioneered in the work of Charles Lever and Anna Maria Hall, who were despised by Carleton, the traditional moralism of whose own work had few emulators. By contrast Trollope's Irish novels of this period are ultimately uninterested in the land situation. In the 1870s and 1880s realism was achieved in the work of Margaret Brew and Annie Keary. The 1860s also saw the development both of the Fenian novel and of the Irish political novel, the latter due to the efforts of Trollope and his character Phineas Finn, who features in several of the Palliser novels. It was carried on, largely single-handedly, by the moderate Irish nationalist parliamentarian Justin McCarthy (1830–1912), who continued to write political novels for thirty years or so.

This chapter studies primogeniture and its impact, a preoccupation of novels of the time. It argues that novelists of the period were not social reformers with strong convictions about inheritance law reform, but they generated ideas about the strengths and weaknesses of laws and customs. They comprehended the policy or preference of keeping estates intact, but they also had an eye for undeserving heirs and talented but unfunded progeny. It is generally the case that where there is no obvious best strategy in pursuit of a social goal, there is no stable legal rule or custom. In such settings, literature can play an important role in accelerating “reform,” experimentation, or simply instability in the rules. Anthony Trollope's novels help advance the idea that important novelists, then as now, are likely to fashion stories that champion the underdog or simply cast doubt on inherited norms. Unintended consequences are more fun and more provocative than are predictable ones.

A novel such as Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset can be thought of as a “model of community.” It represents in miniature what Trollope and his readers apparently thought Victorian middle- and upper-class small town communities were like, as opposed to the corrupt London non-communities presented in the novel. This big multi-plotted novel is read in detail from this perspective and from the perspective of what Trollope says in An Autobiography about his own life. The conclusion of this reading is that, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, The Last Chronicle, far from dramatizing a happy community that was a wish-fulfillment or successful compensation for Trollope’s sense of being a “pariah,” his novel writing was a way of projecting into fictions his permanent and ineradicable sense of his forlorn difference from others. Trollope’s novels in the end confirm his own singularity and bring his readers news of theirs.

Victoria Glendinning has noted that the “Ur-story” of Trollope’s novels consists of a romantic triangle where a protagonist is romantically committed to one character, yet becomes attracted to another character and hence delays the fulfillment of the first relationship. Trollope’s use of this form is not accidental: his novels return repeatedly and reflectively to agents who act against their own best judgment. Characters like Phineas Finn, who act on impulses they wish they did not have and for reasons with which they themselves disagree, demonstrate the centrality of the philosophical problem of akrasia or “weakness of the will” to Trollope’s thought, and thus make clear the extent to which Trollope’s use of the form of the romantic triangle is a tool for the analysis of a problem in moral psychology.

This chapter looks at Anthony Trollope’s most sustained fictional meditation on India as well as a key example of the naturalistic narrative of capitalist globalization. Famously influenced by Collins’s The Moonstone, The Eustace Diamonds channels the author’s growing disdain for the New Imperialism. Through a triangulation of realpolitik (marital, political, and geopolitical), this fourth Palliser novel elucidates the imperial governmentality consolidating behind an affect of technocratic boredom and a show of imperial aesthetics. Trollope regarded Disraeli as a kind of “secret Jew” whose simulated Christianity was more pernicious than avowed Jewishness—an aversion that recurs in a wide variety of writings. But in The Eustace Diamonds, it is Lizzie rather than the Jewish Emilius who most piquantly embodies imperial theatricality. A Disraeliesque schemer, Lizzie introduces a stylistic referentiality that is alien to Trollope’s customary sociological register, the sign of a Trollopian power to stretch form beyond the crude anti-Semitic scapegoat.

An avid travel writer, who was also an astute ethnographer of provincial and metropolitan lifeworlds, Anthony Trollope’s richly sociological variations on the geopolitical aesthetic included multiple genre experiments. Although he embraced the “Greater British” vision of trade and settlement, Trollope was at best ambivalent about territorial empire and stridently critical of Disraeli’s Tory imperialism. Chapter 3 elucidates the centripetal and centrifugal cross-currents in his oeuvre. Trollope’s Barsetshire fiction eulogized England’s rootedness while his travel narratives affirmed far-flung global expansion—thus creating a two-part “foreign policy” that played “heirloom” sovereignty off against “cosmopolitan” expansion. In the 1870s, this tense dialectic collapsed, ushering in the “naturalistic narrative of capitalist globalization.” In vividly dramatizing the experience of breached sovereignty and the trope of the alien insider, novels such as The Prime Minister instanced a naturalistic variation on sociological realism, which arose prior to the influence of Zola.

This chapter charts an increasing, if conflicted, desire in British political discourse generally, and the writings of Anthony Trollope specifically, to re-engage with Caesar, Cicero, and the history of the late republic after a generation of avoiding the more incendiary associations of the Roman past outlined in Chapter 3. Through examination of Anthony Trollope’s deeply political Palliser novels, it maps some of the associations of Liberal, reformist energy and enduring respect for political tradition which Trollope associates with Caesar and Cicero respectively in an age where the rise of Napoleon III threatened to reignite some of the more dynastic French associations of the Roman parallel.

This chapter explores mid-Victorian political liberalism and liberalism's relation to its imperial holdings. It discusses how Ireland mattered in Anthony Trollope's novel Phineas Finn and it particularly looks at Irish tenant rights. The Union of Settlement between Ireland and Britain was often understood—not just among liberals—as a problem of consent, framed in the affective language of attachment, even allegorized as a marital union. More important to this parallel construction between political and marital consent is the ethical content of these choices. Phineas Finn, however, opens a tiny aperture onto an alternative perspective of liberalism. This liberalism takes its stand not through appropriation or imperial occupation but from an ambivalent relation to one's own place, a dual occupation, as if an Irishman and liberal all at once, in the same space. It is liberalism where consent occurs through attachment and connection, not coercion or alienation.

The chapter begins with a summary of the life of William Makepeace Thackeray and how he started writing novels. During his time, he wrote Vanity Fair, based in London, which was the centre of the global economy and part of a large empire. The chapter also discusses in detail other novels written inthe Victorian and Edwardian periods. Insights about xenophobia are also contemplated through an analysis of Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now and George Eliot's Deronda. A contrast of ideas can be spotted from the analysis: The Way We Live focuses on showing how the English nation degenerates at the hand of the foreigners. To show a contrast, the Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad is also elaborated in the chapter. Its dramatis personae are non-English characters.

Illegitimacy is both legal disability and social stigma. In pre-Victorian and Victorian Britain, the two impediments were mutually reinforcing: legal exclusions imposed on “bastards” a debased social status, supporting and compounding varied forms of discrimination. And moral opprobrium directed at the child who is the fruit and evidence of a sinful sexual union was among the motivations for imposition of legal penalties. This chapter examines these social/legal stereotypes and their subversion in Anthony Trollope's novels through an analysis of Ralph the Heir (1872) and Dr. Thorne (1858), It argues that Trollope's primary contribution to law lies not in his ruminations on this or that statute, but rather in a more general critique of Victorian society that his treatment of illegitimacy suggests.

This chapter concentrates on the opposition between the tragic and the postmodern as represented by anti-foundationalist thinking, with Anthony Trollope's The Warden being discussed as a proto-postmodern work that is both anti-tragic and anti-foundationalist in several respects. A description of the archdeacon's breakfast parlour in Chapter 8 of The Warden is one of the most intriguing passages in Trollope's fiction. The conflict which is most central to The Warden and which creates a potentially tragic situation is a political one in which there is a power struggle between conservatism and radicalism and their irreconcilable philosophies, and language is a significant aspect of this conflict. The Warden's position is essentially pragmatist in the sense favoured by Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish: it does not matter that one cannot transcend the political as long as one avoids becoming trapped within a fixed set of political principles.

This chapter considers the influence of liberalism, both conceptually and formally, on the high realist tradition. Coming at the same historical juncture, liberalism and realism explore many of the same issues: imagining the critique of custom and convention as a way of life; mediating between the moral life of individuals and a long sociological or historical view of communities and societies; and finding a way to acknowledge violence and suffering, both natural and social. This chapter analyzes three major realist texts of the nineteenth century—Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch—showing how they use distinctive formal strategies to reflect the competing claims of individual virtue, on the one hand, and political principles and social reform, on the other. Each novel reflects a distinctive liberal concern: Bleak House explores the relation between moral aspiration and systemic critique, The Way We Live Now reflects the tension between liberal critique and embedded custom, and Middlemarch shows the gap between ethics and politics. Throughout, transpersonal or impersonal forms and practices make their force felt alongside the individualism so familiar from those strands of liberalism that have influenced literary studies heretofore.

This chapter closely explores Charles Darwin's Autobiography. The very qualities that mark the autobiographies of Darwin, Anthony Trollope, and John Stuart Mill as unliterary can be read as reflections of a pervasive scientific vision which gives the documents the authority the rhetoric seems to be disclaiming. It then examines a roughly contemporaneous autobiographical narrative that does not fit the dying-to-know pattern, John Henry Newman's Apologia pro vita sua. Mill's autobiography is a dramatization of the inhumanity of the paradox at the center of the epistemology behind the narrative of dying to know. Trollope's autobiography offers considerable evidence of the ways the sort of dehumanization in fact assists the novelist in getting at the truth. The complications of the passion to know, dying to know, are inextricably entangled in the life it must renounce.

Although many historical narratives of the Risorgimento and early Italian constitutional monarchy view Italy as a nation-state unable to consolidate itself against political division and regional diversity, Italian political culture’s cultivation of a sense of internal fragmentation and powerlessness also constituted part of the Risorgimento’s ideological content and Italy’s national identity. Risorgimento culture’s oppositionalism also infiltrated British reaction to Italian politics. Theodosia Garrow Trollope’s eyewitness Athenaeum correspondence, collected as Social Aspects of the Italian Revolution (1861), develops politicised familial metaphors for unification and international alliance that empower and transform Italy through political solidarity. By contrast, texts by D. G. Rossetti, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, Henrietta Jenkin and Arthur Hugh Clough propose more sceptical familial and romantic metaphors for Risorgimento Italy, revealing disillusioned and hesitant attitudes toward Italy in relation to its neighbouring powers, including France, Austria and Great Britain.

This chapter examines how fictions by Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Gissing, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and James Joyce took telegraphists, then typists, as thrilling new heroines of modernity. It argues that their vocational proficiencies prompted imaginative speculations on the extent and uses of professional, emotional, and sexual knowledge. Those speculations were manifest in tensions between clerical and sexual reproduction, in questions of integrity arising from those tensions, and, ultimately, in plots haunted by sexual blackmail. The preoccupation with blackmail is one particularly conspicuous dramatization of the authorial unease typists and telegraphists inspired. These Working Girls could be seen as allegorical doubles for writers struggling with the pressures of originality and creative integrity. They helped to articulate anxieties about textual pollution in fictions often composed under duress, and betraying fretfulness about plagiarism, commercial expedience, and creative exhaustion in both their plots and their form.