Anthony Trollope, página 9 de 27

Barchester Towers concerns the leading clergy of the cathedral city of Barchester. The much loved bishop having died, all expectations are that his son, Archdeacon Grantly, will succeed him. Owing to the passage of the power of patronage to a new Prime Minister, a newcomer, the far more Evangelical Bishop Proudie, gains the see. His wife, Mrs. Proudie, exercises an undue influence over the new bishop, making herself as well as the bishop unpopular with most of the clergy of the diocese. Her interference to veto the reappointment of the universally popular Mr. Septimus Harding (Protagonist of Trollopes earlier novel, The Warden) as warden of Hirams Hospital is not well received, even though she gives the position to a needy clergyman, Mr Quiverful, with 14 children to support.Even less popular than Mrs. Proudie is the bishops new chaplain, the hypocritical and sycophantic Mr. Obadiah Slope, who decides it would be expedient to marry Hardings wealthy widowed daughter, Eleanor Bold. Slope hopes to win her favour by interfering in the controversy over the wardenship. The Bishop or rather Mr. Slope under the orders of Mrs. Proudie, also orders the return of the prebendary Dr. Vesey Stanhope from Italy. Stanhope has been in Italy recovering from a sore throat for 12 years and has spent his time catching butterflies. With him to the Cathedral Close come his wife and their three adult children. The younger of Dr. Stanhopes two daughters causes consternation in the Palace and threatens the plans of Mr. Slope. Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni is a disabled serial flirt with a young daughter and a mysterious Italian husband, whom she has left. Mrs Proudie is appalled and considers her an unsafe influence on her daughters, servants and Mr. Slope. Mr. Slope is drawn like a moth to a flame and cannot keep away. Dr. Stanhopes son Bertie is skilled at spending money but not at making it; his sisters think marriage to rich Eleanor Bold will help.The Old Dean of the Cathedral having died, Mr. Slope campaigns to become Dean but Mr. Harding is offered the preferment, with a beautiful house in the Close and fifteen acres of garden. Mr. Harding considers himself unsuitable and with the help of the archdeacon, arranges that Mr. Arabin be made Dean. With the Stanhopes return to Italy, life in the Cathedral Close returns to normal and Mr. Harding continues his life of gentleness and music.

The Way We Live Now is a scathing satirical novel published in London in 1875 by Anthony Trollope, after a popular serialisation. It was regarded by many of Trollopes contemporaries as his finest work.One of his longest novels (it contains a hundred chapters), The Way We Live Now is particularly rich in sub-plot. It was inspired by the financial scandals of the early 1870s, and lashes at the pervading dishonesty of the age, commercial, political, moral, and intellectual. It is one of the last significant Victorian novels to have been published in monthly parts.

No one, probably, ever felt himself to be more alone in the world than our old friend, the Duke of Omnium, when the Duchess died. When this sad event happened he had ceased to be Prime Minister. During the first nine months after he had left office he and the Duchess remained in England. Then they had gone abroad, taking with them their three children. The eldest, Lord Silverbridge, had been at Oxford, but had had his career there cut short by some more than ordinary youthful folly, which had induced his father to agree with the college authorities that his name had better be taken off the college books,all which had been cause of very great sorrow to the Duke. The other boy was to go to Cambridge; but his father had thought it well to give him a twelvemonths run on the Continent, under his own inspection. Lady Mary, the only daughter, was the youngest of the family, and she also had been with them on the Continent. They remained the full year abroad, travelling with a large accompaniment of tutors, ladys-maids, couriers, and sometimes friends. I do not know that the Duchess or the Duke had enjoyed it much; but the young people had seen something of foreign courts and much of foreign scenery, and had perhaps perfected their French.

AS all the world knows, the old fortifications of Vienna have been pulled down,the fortifications which used to surround the centre or kernel of the city; and the vast spaces thus thrown open and forming a broad ring in the middle of the town have not as yet been completely filled up with those new buildings and gardens which are to be there, and which, when there, will join the outside city and the inside city together, so as to make them into one homogeneous whole.The work, however, is going on, and if the war which has come and passed has not swallowed everything appertaining to Austria into its maw, the ugly remnants of destruction will be soon carted away, and the old glacis will be made bright with broad pavements, and gilded railings, and well-built lofty mansions, and gardens beautiful with shrubs, and beautiful with turf also, if Austrian patience can make turf to grow beneath an Austrian sky.

There is the proper mood and the just environment for the reading as well as for the writing of works of fiction, and there can be no better place for the enjoying of a novel by Anthony Trollope than under a tree in Kensington Gardens of a summer day. Under a tree in the avenue that reaches down from the Round Pond to the Long Water. There, perhaps more than anywhere else, lingers the early Victorian atmosphere. As we sit beneath our tree, we see in the distance the dun, red-brick walls of Kensington Palace, where one night Princess Victoria was awakened to hear that she was Queen; there in quaint, hideously ugly Victorian rooms are to be seen Victorian dolls and other playthings; the whole environment is early Victorian. Here to the minds eye how easy it is to conjure up ghosts of men in baggy trousers and long flowing whiskers, of prim women in crinolines, in hats with long trailing feathers and with ridiculous little parasols, or with Grecian-bends and chignonschurch-parading to and fro beneath the trees or by the waters edgeperchance, even the fascinating Lady Crinoline and the elegant Mr. Macassar Jones, whose history has been written by Clerk Charley in the pages we are introducing to the gentle reader.

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. We will tell the story of Lizzie Greystock from the beginning, but we will not dwell over it at great length, as we might do if we loved her. She was the only child of old Admiral Greystock, who in the latter years of his life was much perplexed by the possession of a daughter. The admiral 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. He had no particular fortune, and yet his daughter, when she was little more than a child, went about everywhere with jewels on her fingers, and red gems hanging round her neck, and yellow gems pendent from her ears, and white gems shining in her black hair. She was hardly nineteen when her father died and she was taken home by that dreadful old termagant, her aunt, Lady Linlithgow.

It is certainly of service to a man to know who were his grandfathers and who were his grandmothers if he entertain an ambition to move in the upper circles of society, and also of service to be able to speak of them as of persons who were themselves somebodies in their time. No doubt we all entertain great respect for those who by their own energies have raised themselves in the world; and when we hear that the son of a washerwoman has become Lord Chancellor or Archbishop of Canterbury we do, theoretically and abstractedly, feel a higher reverence for such self-made magnate than for one who has been as it were born into forensic or ecclesiastical purple. But not the less must the offspring of the washerwoman have had very much trouble on the subject of his birth, unless he has been, when young as well as when old, a very great man indeed.

Dr. Finn, of Killaloe, in county Clare, was as well known in those parts,the confines, that is, of the counties Clare, Limerick, Tipperary, and Galway,as was the bishop himself who lived in the same town, and was as much respected. Many said that the doctor was the richer man of the two, and the practice of his profession was extended over almost as wide a district. Indeed the bishop whom he was privileged to attend, although a Roman Catholic, always spoke of their dioceses being conterminate. It will therefore be understood that Dr. Finn,Malachi Finn was his full name,had obtained a wide reputation as a country practitioner in the west of Ireland. And he was a man sufficiently well to do, though that boast made by his friends, that he was as warm a man as the bishop, had but little truth to support it.

As all the world knows, the old fortifications of Vienna have been pulled down,the fortifications which used to surround the centre or kernel of the city; and the vast spaces thus thrown open and forming a broad ring in the middle of the town have not as yet been completely filled up with those new buildings and gardens which are to be there, and which, when there, will join the outside city and the inside city together, so as to make them into one homogeneous whole.The work, however, is going on, and if the war which has come and passed has not swallowed everything appertaining to Austria into its maw, the ugly remnants of destruction will be soon carted away, and the old glacis{4} will be made bright with broad pavements, and gilded railings, and well-built lofty mansions, and gardens beautiful with shrubs, and beautiful with turf also, if Austrian patience can make turf to grow beneath an Austrian sky.On an evening of September, when there was still something left of daylight, at eight oclock, two girls were walking together in the Burgplatz, or large open space which lies between the city palace of the emperor and the gate which passes thence from the old town out to the new town. Here at present stand two bronze equestrian statues, one of the Archduke Charles, and the other of Prince Eugene. And they were standing there also, both of them, when these two girls were walking round them; but that of the prince had not as yet been uncovered for the public.There was coming a great gala day in the city, Emperors and empresses, archdukes and grand-dukes, with their archduchesses and grand-duchesses, and princes and ministers, were to be there, and the new statue of Prince Eugene was to be submitted to the art-critics of the world. There was very much thought at Vienna of the statue in those days.

Fred Neville, a young officer in the Hussars, is heir to an earldom, but before taking up his responsibilities resolves to enjoy a year of adventure in Ireland where his regiment is posted. When Fred falls in love and seduces an Irish girl of great beauty and mysterious background, the scene is set for a tragic outcome that far exceeds the adventures Fred had in mind. Written in 1870 but not published until 1879, An Eye For An Eye is arguably the most melodramatic story that Trollope wrote and certainly his frankest and most daring treatment of pre-marital sex.