David Alfred Bywaters's Crossword Cavalcade & Fortnightly Victorian Novel Recommender. Every Saturday! Either a new language-torturing puzzle or an old novel by an unjustly neglected Victorian author. Why waste time on other amusements?

Novel 030: Thomas Adolphus Trollope, Durnton Abbey (1871)

George Elgar Hicks, Mother and Baby
George Elgar Hicks, Mother and Baby

A feckless bank clerk woos a farmer’s daughter and is wooed by a local aristocrat in need of funds.

Thomas Adolphus Trollope (1810-1892) was Frances Milton Trollope’s first son and Anthony Trollope's older brother.  The plot of this novel heats up after a slow beginning; its bad characters are memorable studies in self-deception, led as they are by banal, routine desires into extravagantly evil behavior.

The characters are “natural but by virtue of their mediocrity. . . .  Virtue is mediocre in [Trollope's] hands, and the contrast between it and vice is marked only by the degree in which the latter falls below the mean”; still the novel is “well written, and superior to the common run of novels in originality and interest.” Athenaeum, July 29, 1871

“A well constructed, interesting story”; “one of the chief charms . . . is the humorous portraiture with which it abounds.” Graphic, August 5, 1871

“In spite of many scenes of considerable humour and not a little pathos,” the “coarse vice” portrayed in the novel “left in our mind . . . a most unpleasant recollection.”  Saturday Review, August 26, 1871

Download this week’s novel here:

v.1 http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_00000003F87C

v.2 http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_00000003F882

v.2 http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_00000003F876