It is one of life’s delicious ironies that the founder of Save the Children, Eglantyne Jebb, referred to infants as “little wretches”. She went on to say that “the Dreadful Idea of closer acquaintance never entered my head”. Notwithstanding this aversion to the actual artefact, Jebb saved the lives of millions of children through her indefatigable efforts, raising awareness that the younger generation comprised an important national asset that should be protected and nurtured.

By rummaging through letters, diaries, journals and press-clippings, Clare Mulley presents a rich profile of her subject, deftly handling Jebb’s inherent contradictions and sometimes unlikeable characteristics. This is a very personal biography, with Mulley providing insights into the biographer’s relationship with their subject, and how this is prone to challenges and frustrations.

Eglantyne Jebb was born in 1876, one of five boisterous siblings in an intellectual and prosperous Shropshire household. The potentially deleterious effects of a Conservative father were counteracted by the presence of Aunt Bun, an ardent Liberal and advocate of women’s rights. Unsurprisingly, Mr Jebb was not keen on the idea of young Eglantyne going to university, believing it would turn her into an unmarriageable bluestocking. Supported by her Aunt, herself a Newnham graduate, Eglantyne got her way, anticipating the determination that was to characterise her later achievements.

As Mulley writes, “Only two years before Eglantyne arrived at Lady Margaret Hall women had to be chaperoned to lectures and could not join a university society, or cycle on Sundays. They could still not cross a college quad alone and had to be in by ten at night unless granted special leave.” In such a circumscribed environment, this indomitable and striking character caused a stir among the other female undergraduates. One described her as “dressed in green, with golden-red curly hair and a complexion seldom found outside a novel.”

After pushing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour for Oxford gels, Eglantyne left university with a second-class degree and trained to be a teacher, one of the few career opportunities open to women at the time. Her snobbery and lack of worldliness is exposed when she comments disdainfully that her fellow trainees “wear aprons and have accents”. Although disillusioned with her initial foray into pedagogy, Eglantyne persevered, taking a post at a school for working-class girls. This proximity to children gave her little pleasure, and the strain of unwilling labour caused a breakdown and a swift exit from her nascent profession.

A move to Cambridge provided refreshment – both a change of scene and a welcome release from the lower orders. Although old-fashioned in so many ways, early-twentieth-century Cambridge offered many opportunities for the intellectually curious, and Eglantyne soon involved herself with the Charities Organisation Society, going on to write an important social survey of her new city. As Mulley observes, “For Eglantyne, poverty was neither a result of natural law or providence, nor purely a government policy issue, but a collective social responsibility that could only be addressed through the promotion of active citizenship across all social classes and generations.” Jebb’s perspicacity on local issues became part of her much grander vision.

It was at the Charities Organisation Society that Jebb met Margaret Keynes, sister to the famous economist. Eglantyne found herself drawn to this “exceedingly pretty and winsome” young woman, who shared her passion for social issues. Their opposite personalities were complimentary: Eglantyne confident, yet physically frail; Margaret nervous, but unflagging in her desire to serve her new mentor. Although it is clear from letters and journals that Margaret and Eglantyne enjoyed a physical relationship, they were living at a time when lesbianism was not recognised or acknowledged. Intense female friendships were common, many of which would now be interpreted as sexual. Mulley handles the issue with admirable sensitivity, avoiding a retrospective categorisation, but at the same time acknowledging the importance of their relationship. Margaret and Eglantyne discussed their “marriage” and the possibility of buying a house together. Their plans were fully supported by Eglantyne’s mother, who wanted her daughter to be happy.

Eglantyne was indeed happy, at least until Margaret forsook her for a professor of frog anatomy. Edging towards twenty-eight, Margaret realised that a conventional marriage would provide her with children, financial security and also social acceptability. Although Eglantyne was dignified in rejection, her pain was overwhelming, no doubt compounded by Margaret’s insensitivity in expecting her approval. While Margaret embraced her new and conventional life, Eglantyne was left lonely and grieving. She confided to her diary: “I miss Margaret more and more … I miss her and I miss her, however things happen and wherever I am. This great affection of mine seems to shatter me and yet I do not believe it is wrong to feel it.”

Characteristically, Eglantyne threw herself into work as a distraction from heartache, producing a report on the humanitarian crisis in the Balkans. Her experiences led her to conclude: “It is in war itself, not in its victims, that the barbarity lies.” The horror of conflict displaced Eglantyne’s patriotism, leaving her with a passionate antipathy towards all war. She was particularly moved by the consequences for the innocent, making the irrefragable statement, “Surely it is impossible for us, as normal human beings, to watch children starve to death without making an effort to save them.” That’s exactly what she set out to do.

While many would have agreed with Eglantyne’s sentiments, she actually acted on her beliefs, establishing Save the Children with her sister Dorothy Buxton in 1919. Although the initial aim was to alleviate starving children in the aftermath of the the Allied Blockade, the charity’s scope became international, helping to save millions of young lives. By the end of the following year, Eglantyne had raised the equivalent of £8m, boosted by an endorsement from Pope Benedict XV (a rare, if not unique, example of papal intervention actually helping matters). Other prominent figures also lent support, including George Bernard Shaw, who contributed the laconic but poignant statement: “I have no enemies under the age of seven”.

Eglantyne’s achievements were remarkable, especially given her persistent ill health. She suffered from heart problems, depression and vacillating energy levels, often resulting in extreme exhaustion. Now recognised as symptoms of an overactive thyroid, there was little understanding of the condition at the time. Eglantyne wrote, “In idleness it seems impossible to be happy,” the benefits of rest entirely counteracted by the stress of being rendered inactive. These periods also gave her time to reflect on the loss of Margaret, and she struggled with the “wish to escape from the personal pain of living”.  Her sheer force of will kept Eglantyne going, and she often worked from her sick bed. Eventually, however, her body was worn down and she succumbed to a stroke at the age of just fifty-two.

Her time on earth was relatively short, but Eglantyne Jebb achieved a great deal with her allotted span, saving children, redefining child welfare and writing influential social policy, all in an era when women were excluded from political life. Her legacy is particularly impressive for someone who didn’t even like children. As Mulley notes, “Eglantyne chose the universal over the particular. Her focus was not a personal, embodied child, but an unknown, universal, symbolic child, that represented social potential.” While Save the Children is one of the world’s best-known charitable organisations, Eglantyne herself remains obscure figure, and she has not received the recognition she deserves. Mind you, Princess Anne named one of her bull terriers Eglantyne, which is perhaps the epitome of a backhanded compliment.

Mulley makes a compelling case for Eglantyne Jebb’s resurrection as an important figure. Although impressed by her subject’s achievements, Mulley never recoils from presenting the less attractive qualities, such as her snobbishness and intellectual aloofness. Eglantyne’s complex and contradictory nature is presented in an engaging narrative, embodying a perfect balance between historical context, character, and readability. Jebb was serious about her work, but never took herself too seriously, and her sense of fun permeates a book punctuated with much sadness. This unlikely children’s champion has been given overdue acknowledgement by a talented, sympathetic and insightful biographer.

The Woman Who Saved the Children is available in paperback and Kindle editions. All royalties are donated to Save the Children, so you can read a wonderful book and also help a good cause at the same time.

In honour of World Book Night, Victorian Secrets are giving away 5 copies of David Waller’s The Perfect Man: The Muscular Life and Times of Eugen Sandow.

If you’d like to win a copy, please head over to Victorian Secrets and leave a comment,  telling us what book you think Eugen Sandow should read. The best five will be chosen on Friday 27th April at 5pm (GMT).

As it’s World Book Night, I’m giving away a copy (kindly supplied by the publisher) of James Gleick’s exciting new book The Information.  I haven’t got around to reading it as yet, but the reviews have been glowing:

 To grasp what information truly means—to explain why it is shaping up as a unifying principle of science—Gleick has to embrace linguistics, logic, telecommunications, codes, computing, mathematics, philosophy, cosmology, quantum theory and genetics. He must call as witnesses not only Charles Babbage, Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel, but also Borges, Poe and Lewis Carroll. There are few writers who could accomplish this with such panache and authority. Gleick, whose 1987 work Chaos helped to kickstart the era of modern popular science, is one. (The Observer)

There’s also a video, if you’re so inclined.

Anyway, if you fancy a chance of winning a free copy, please leave me a comment below, giving your view on the best aspect of the information age. One line will do! I’ll choose the best one on Friday 27th April and send the book to the winner.

Update: Brett was chosen as the winner and the book is on its way to him. Many thanks to all those who entered.

Stephen King once rudely referred to the first Palliser novel as Can You Finish It? It’s certainly true that Trollope wasn’t known for his brevity, and this handsome new OUP edition of Can You Forgive Her? is 700 pages long. However, Trollope grapples with an ambitious range of political and social themes and, in so doing, presents a compelling and provocative narrative.

The central question raised is ‘What should a woman do with her life?’ and it is examined through expertly-drawn characters who all make very different choices. Alice Vavasor is a young woman with an independent fortune who has ended up engaged to a stuffed shirt by the name of John Grey. Although eminently respectable, Grey (as his name suggests) is interested mainly in propriety, and is ill-suited to a wife who seems likely to prove a handful. Alice’s cousin and quondam lover George predicts: “He’d make an upper servant of her; very respectable, no doubt, but still only an upper servant.”

George Vavasor is the antithesis of John Grey: he lives for excitement, caring little for respectability. His financial speculations go disastrously wrong, he is disinherited by his grandfather, and he even assaults his loyal sister, Kate. George’s reckless behaviour prompted Alice to break their earlier engagement, but Kate is now determined that they should be reunited. Her motive is two-pronged: George needs Alice’s money in order to fulfil his parliamentary aspirations, and Kate wants a closer union with Alice.

As Dinah Birch discusses in her excellent introduction to this edition, Trollope hints at the idea of female marriage, with Kate effectively pursuing the courtship of Alice on her brother’s behalf. “Oh, heavens! how I envy him!”, she says when she imagines George caressing Alice. This unusual triangulation leads to a more equal marriage, with George referring to Alice as his “partner” and “a dear friend bearing the same name”. In marrying George, Alice is not obliged to change her name, thereby retaining her own identity, which otherwise would have been subsumed into that of her husband.

The plot concerning Alice has become rather overshadowed by the introduction elsewhere of two of Trollope’s most famous characters: Plantagenet and Glencora Palliser. We see Glencora as a wealthy young heiress, stultified by her arranged marriage with an austere and serious-minded husband. She is distracted by the dubious charms of the ne’er do well Burgo Fitzgerald and comes within a gnat’s whisker of breaking her wedding vows. The prospect of losing his wife to a bad ‘un rouses Palliser from his stupor and the planned elopement is foiled in a dramatic ballroom scene. Glencora “had been counselled that it was not fitting for her to love as she had thought to love, and she had resolved to give up her dream.” Essentially, she receives an early lesson in the sexual double standard. Whereas George Vavasor is able to maintain a mistress and visit prostitutes, a young woman must accept that her life is circumscribed.

Trollope’s answer to the question “what should a woman do with her life?” is “marry and have children”. There’s no other option, so they should simply stop mithering and get on with it. As Dinah Birch writes in the introduction, “In Trollope’s view, Alice’s suffering is rooted in her persistent indecision, not in the limited choices available to her.” Although she strives to resist her fate, Trollope is careful not to make her one of those pesky feminists: she was “not so far advanced as to think that women should be lawyers and doctors.” As such, her struggle is futile, as she gives no serious consideration to anything other than the status quo.

Although Trollope’s conclusion is, as ever, morally conservative, he does allow his heroines some feelings along the way. Female chastity is shown to be a matter of resistance, rather than an innate quality. He also shows through George the disastrous consequences of men being given too much liberty. His handling of relationship dynamics is incredible and his portrayal of Lady Glencora and Plantagenet Palliser’s marriage is genuinely moving, setting a keynote for the rest of the series of novels.

Yes, it’s a long book, but one in which the reader can become utterly absorbed, luxuriating in Trollope’s exquisitely-imagined world.

Victorian Popular Fiction Association

4th Annual Conference, 11^th – 13^th July 2012

Institute for English Studies, University of London

Theme:  Hard Cash: Money, property, economics and the marketplace in Victorian Popular Culture

Keynote speakers: Regenia Gagnier: “The Globalization of Victorian Popular Fiction” and Deborah Wynne: ‘Hades! The Ladies! Male Drapers and Female Shoppers’

Guest Speakers:  David Waller, author of The Perfect Man:  The Muscular Life and Times of Eugen Sandow Victorian Strongman and Helen Rappaport author of Beautiful For Ever:  Madame Rachel of Bond Street – Cosmetician, Con-Artist, and Blackmailer

The VPFA conference is now an established event on the annual conference timetable and offers a friendly and invigorating opportunity for established academics and postgraduate students to share their current research.  Our theme this year is Hard Cash: Money, property, economics and the marketplace in Victorian Popular Culture.  This theme enables us to develop the interdisciplinary study of nineteenth-century popular culture, and changing attitudes to money and economics across the period.

Papers relevant to the theme may be drawn from any aspect of Victorian popular culture and may address literal or metaphorical representations of the theme.

We remain committed to the revival of interest in understudied female and male popular writers which is pivotal to the reputation this conference has established.   We invite proposals for 20 minute papers on any aspect of the above theme.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

• Money, Economics and literary production
• Literary contracts, agents, serialization, syndication, cheap editions, copyright law
• Advertising and the popular press
• Money and the popular press
• Money and class in Victorian popular culture
• New money in Victorian popular culture
• Business and the marketplace
• Inheritance
• Married Women’s Property and Divorce Law
• Public readings, stage adaptation
• Celebrity
• Theft, blackmail and swindling
• Financial scandals
• Banks and bankers
• Shopping and consumerism

Postgraduate students are particularly welcome.

Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words to either Jane Jordan (j.jordan@kingston.ac.uk) or Greta Depledge (depledgeg@aol.com) by: Monday 30th April 2012.    

For further information about the Victorian Popular Fiction Association, see:

http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/research/victorian/

This mightn’t be the best day to confess that I’m not too fussed about Dickens’s fiction. For me, he’s far too prolix, and his female characters never transcend caricature. However, I do believe that Dickens was the finest social commentator of the nineteenth century, and have long coveted the 12-volume Pilgrim Edition of his letters. I was delighted, therefore, to receive from OUP The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Jenny Hartley (author of the superb Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women). This handsome tome includes 450 carefully-selected letters, accompanied by a thoughtful introduction and a useful index. The subjects covered include: child-exploitation, ragged schools, soup kitchens, the Great Exhibition, ravens, terrible acting, and the horror that is children’s birthday parties. This is a super collection, and it takes up much less shelf space than the full caboodle.

Fellow Victorian geeks might recall Ruth Richardson’s recent campaign to save the Cleveland Street Workhouse from demolition. While working on her book Dickens and the Workhouse, Richardson discovered that the young Dickens lived only a few doors from this terrifying institution. This unhappy contiguity had a profound effect on the author’s career, most notably in Oliver Twist, but also supplied the inspiration for many of his characters and plot-lines. Most excitingly (and also scarily), Richardson established that Bill Sikes really existed – he was a tallow chandler, operating from a shop opposite the workhouse. Not only was he a violent pimp, but he also smelled of sheep fat. Lovely! It’s another sumptuous edition from OUP, and I’m looking forward to some nineteenth-century squalor.

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Mr Dickens.

There’s not much that surprises me these days, but Lady Worsley’s Whim managed to repeatedly elevate the papal eyebrows. The story centres around an infamous crim-con trial that took place on 21 February 1782 between Sir Richard Worsley, Governor of the Isle of Wight, and George Bisset, an officer (but not a gentleman) and one-time friend of Worsley. Despite having encouraged a close relationship between Bisset and his wife, Worsley thought it outrageous when the pair ran off together, and claimed £20,000 in damages. Already a wealthy man, the astronomical sum was designed to reduce his enemy to penury.

Sir Richard’s willingness to assign a purely financial value to the loss of his wife was entirely in character. He was a decidedly cold fish who was far more interested in collecting artefacts and bolstering his social status. Impervious to the charms of young heiress Seymour Dorothy Fleming, he had eyes only for her £70,000 fortune (equivalent to around £66m today). Once she had become Lady Worsley and divested herself of both identity and assets, Sir Richard was no longer interested in her. Lady Worsley remained a virgin until three months after their marriage, when her husband reluctantly did his duty and sired an heir.

Bored witless with little to distract her, Lady Worsley made her own entertainment. On one occasion she and two friends went on a three-day rampage, culminating in setting fire to a room in an inn:

‘How do you think they quenched the flame their own fair selves had caused? They did not call water! Water!, it was more at hand …’ these three well-bred young ladies, who had been taught to dance, embroider and lisp sweetly in French, lifted their silk skirts ‘and fairly pissed it out …’

Even this distinctly unladylike behaviour was insufficient to attract her husband’s attention.

When Sir Richard met Bisset, he thought his prayers had been answered. Here was a dashing officer who fulfilled his homosocial needs and his wife’s sexual appetites. Bisset was invited to live with couple in a bizarre ménage à trois, with Sir Richard acting as voyeur while the other two amused themselves. He even seemed nonplussed when his wife became pregnant with Bisset’s child. This phlegmatic husband made little attempt to disguise his complicity in his wife’s liaison – at one crucial point he allowed Bisset to stand on his shoulders so he could watch the naked Lady Worsley getting dressed after a swim. This was to become ‘the most regrettable day of his life’, as we shall see.

Bisset and Lady Worsley’s relationship blossomed into love and they decided it would be quite nice to enjoy one another without her husband peering at them. They crept off into the night on 19 November 1781, taking up residence in a London hotel. Sir Richard finally discovered some virility at this point. Adultery was one thing, but his wife had destroyed the sanctity of marriage and his friend had thumbed his nose at the fraternal bond. Humiliated by his cuckold’s horns, Sir Richard invoked the full force of husbandly privilege, denying his estranged wife both money and any of her personal effects. She had only the clothes she wore on the night of the elopement and was entirely reliant on her lover, despite having provided an impressive dowry. As a wife, she had no right to her other clothes and jewels, worth an astonishing £15 million in today’s money.

The subsequent court case didn’t reflect well on anyone. As a mere woman, Lady Worsley had no right to defend herself, and the only tactic left to her was to prove she wasn’t worth the £20,000 damages claimed by Sir Richard. A seemingly endless succession of young bucks took to the witness stand to testify to having satisfied Lady Worsley’s whims, thereby branding her a worthless trollope. The judge consequently awarded damages of just one shilling, also denouncing the wronged husband as a foolish pervert. The crux of the case was his encouraging Bisset to watch his naked wife, so it was very clear that he had brought about his own downfall.

Perhaps inevitably, Bisset soon tired of his notorious lover and found himself a respectable wife.  The redoubtable Lady Worsley ended up in revolutionary Paris, embarking upon a new life and many adventures. Fortunately, Sir Richard died young enough for her to reclaim some of her fortune and find happiness with a much younger husband. Lady Worsley’s tenacity is both astonishing and humbling. Although rendered impotent by the law, she refused to tolerate the machinations of her sadistic, calculating husband. At a time when the only thing wives possessed was their virtue, she was willing to sacrifice it in order to extricate herself from an invidious position.

Hallie Rubenhold has done her subject justice by allowing her story to be heard and also setting it carefully in its historical context, thereby emphasising the remarkable nature of Lady Worsley’s actions. Rubenhold’s narrative skill is as remarkable as her subject. I found it impossible to put the book down and my knuckles were white from gripping it so tightly through all the twists and turns. The historical and legal detail is skilfully interwoven with the story, without either dominating or slowing it down. An extraordinary book about an extraordinary woman.

Lady Worsley’s Whim is available in paperback and Kindle editions.

Having recently drawn attention to Trollope’s less successful works, it seems only fair to trumpet one of his finer novels. The Golden Lion of Granpère (1872) is a short but perfectly-formed tale of love and unreasonable patriarchs, set against a richly-drawn backdrop of provincial France.

The Lion d’Or is a small town hotel, owned by the ambitious Michel Voss. He lives there with his son George, his second wife and her niece, Marie Bromar. Perhaps inevitably, Marie and George fall in love, thereby incurring the Jehovah-like wrath of Michel. He believes that each of them could make a more advantageous marriage, conferring greater wealth and influence upon the family. After consent to the couple’s engagement is refused unequivocally, George stomps off in a fit of pique to another town, remaining on non-speakers with his family for a whole year.

Meanwhile, Michel is keen that Marie should instead marry Adrian Urmand, a prosperous linen-buyer from Basle who dazzles Granpere with his urbanity and fancy ways. Marie is unimpressed, however: “George Voss was a real man; whereas Adrian Urmand, tried by such a comparison, was in her estimation simply a rich trader in want of a wife.” His fondness for jewellery and clothes no doubt leads Marie to think that he’d be spending more time in front of the bathroom mirror than attending to her needs.

Michel is displeased by his niece’s intransigence. As a misogynist of the Jurassic order, he thinks women should do exactly what they’re told and “it was always a sign of high good humour on the part of Michel Voss, when he spoke of his wife as being anybody in the household.” His considered opinion of Marie’s failure to bend to his will is: “Young women are queer cattle to take to market. One can never be quite certain which way they want to go.” Well, Marie does know which way she wants to go, and struggles not to be cowed (sorry) into submission.

The Golden Lion of Granpère is one of Trollope’s so-called “single-issue” novels and, as such, is tightly-plotted and narrow in focus. Trollope clearly enjoys himself in delineating the sexist monster Voss, and then taking him down a peg or two. Although this character is meant to be ridiculous, the suggestion lingers that Marie is wrong to disobey him: even a foolish and misguided man trumps a woman. Still, it wouldn’t be Trollope if he didn’t make my chauvinist antenna start wobbling. This grumble aside, it’s an engaging and charming story for those with a taste for Trollope’s less dramatic works.

The book is currently out of print, but there are a few very cheap second-hand copies on Amazon.  There’s also a good-quality free Kindle edition.

Come and hear the Perfect Author talking about the Perfect Man! This promises to be a great evening. If you can’t be there, you can find out more about the book on the website.

David Waller will give an illustrated talk on the life and muscular times of Eugen Sandow, the Victorian strongman who is the subject of his new book The Perfect Man. The talk will take place at 6.30 for 7pm on 22nd February at the  Savile Club, 69 Brook Street, London W1, with optional dinner afterwards. The cost for wine and the talk is £10 while the three course dinner with wine, chocolates and coffee is a further £30 (which is actually quite reasonable given the food is excellent).

To reserve tickets contact Maja at the Savile on 020 7491 5563 or maja@savileclub.co.uk

Following last week’s paean to Trollope’s moments of brilliance, I must now turn the papal eye on his less successful efforts. It’s not to say that the novels listed below are without merit, rather that they left me either unmoved or very cross.

So, here are the stinkers, in no particular order:

The Belton Estate

Trollope is at his most reprehensible in this novel, carefully delineating the wrongs of women, but then desperately clinging to the status quo of primogeniture and wifely submission.

The story is of a young woman, Clara Amedroz, who vacillates between two suitors: her bucolic but passionate cousin Will, heir to her father’s entailed farm, and Captain Aylmer, an urbane but unemotional MP tied to his rebarbative mother’s apron strings. There is no option for Clara to remain single, as she is financially dependent upon men. She dramatically articulates her frustration: “I think it would be well if all single women were strangled by the time they are thirty.”

Although Clara herself is an admirable creation, Trollope’s reiterated argument that she should “suffer and be still” incurred my wrath and made me want to slap him.

The Claverings

This is one of Trollope’s many tales involving a dithering wastrel of a “hero” who can’t decide between a virginal wife and one who has been around the block a few times. Harry Clavering is drawn towards middle-class respectability with Florence Burton, but finds himself unable to resist the allure of the glamorous and widowed Julia Brabazon.

Julia is by far the most engaging character and should be the heroine of the tale; instead she is punished for behaving as good Victorian girls should, by making an advantageous marriage. Here Trollope shows toe-curling timidity, repeatedly punishing Julia for marrying a husband she didn’t love, yet rewarding the snivelling invertebrate Harry for his indecisiveness and intertia. Bah.

The American Senator

The eponymous Senator is Elias Gotobed, whose curious name alludes to that fact that he has a tendency to send people to sleep. Alas, the story he inhabits had a similar effect on me.

The Senator travels to England to undertake a study of English life, managing to inveigle his way into a stately home. He is fiercely critical of British society and perplexed by many of its customs. His valedictory lecture nearly causes a riot when he shares his views with the assembled throng. This character seems to have little merit beyond a narrative device, enabling Trollope to be vicariously rude about his countrymen.

The one redeeming feature is Arabella Trefoil, an alpha female intent on bagging the wealthiest possible husband. Trollope means to be critical of her, but her ability to make the best of a bad situation is laudable. The American Senator is often praised as one of Trollope’s best comic novels, but I cannot agree. Beyond the exquisite Miss Trefoil, it is little more than a rather weasly satire on English society.

The Small House at Allington

This is a controversial choice, as I know it is a favourite of many fellow Trollopites. Although it’s the penultimate Chronicle of Barsetshire, it blends in with the others like an orange in a coal heap.

My main objection can be summarised in two words: Lily Dale. Uggghhh. She plunges herself into “perpetual widowhood” for a man who is entirely without merit and considers herself legally bound to him. I wondered whether their relationship had been consummated, and she therefore felt unable to give herself to another man. In any case, she really needed to pull herself together, rather than moping about like a particularly morose Emo.

Mr Scarborough’s Family

I likened this one to a Tory party political broadcast, which is serious condemnation. The story begins well, with a King Lear moment in which the eponymous Mr Scarborough tries to decide which of his unworthy sons should inherit his considerable wealth. What follows is endless depictions of nasty, selfish people, with whom one is inclined to feel little sympathy.

The eldest son, Mountjoy, is a charmless little herbert who has accumulated eye-watering gambling debts in anticipation of his inheritance. Younger son Augustus can’t wait for his father to die so he can get his hands on the money. Scarborough Père tries to thwart them by declaring them illegitimate one moment, and then legitimising them again through the cunning use of multiple marriage certificates.

The only scenes I enjoyed were those involving Matilda Thoroughbung, a young woman on the cusp of marriage who enquiries as to what she can expect in return for her dowry. She points out that the advent of women’s rights means men can no longer rob vulnerable women: “A young woman doesn’t get taken in as she used to do … Since woman’s rights have come up a young woman is better able to fight her own battle.” Quite.

The Macdermots of Ballycloran

This was Trollope’s first novel, and it shows. Although the family saga is certainly lively, the narrative is rambling and bowing under the weight of supposedly phonetic dialogue. Trollope does a sterling job of recreating the pre-famine Ireland he witnessed during the early years of his post office career, but there’s an over-reliance on the stereotypical potheen, potatoes and peasants.

La Vendée

Conversely, Trollope knew absolutely nothing about the La Vendée region of France, so there aren’t even any beautifully-drawn scenes to relive the tedium of the turgid narrative. Set during the French Revolution, Trollope shows what happens when the common folk forget their place. It was his only attempt at historical fiction, for which fact we must remain grateful.

The Kellys and the O’Kellys

Another Irish family saga, although more polished than The Macdermots. I didn’t find it engaging at all, except for the terrifying sub-plot in which Barry Lynch attempts to force his sister Anty into an asylum in order than he might inherit her share of the family fortune. When this bid fails, he instead tries to murder her. Thankfully, the good are ultimately rewarded with happy marriages and the bad are parcelled off to Boulogne to think over what they’ve done.

Castle Richmond

The only aspect of this novel I can remember is the intensely moving descriptions of Ireland during the famine. They haunted me for weeks afterwards, and must have left an indelible mark on Trollope’s mind after he witnessed them for himself.

Otherwise, it’s an unmemorable tale of wealthy aristocrats living in County Cork who spend their time fretting about inheritance. Trollope himself thought it a failure, and the story is certainly very weak.

The Bertrams

In his Autobiography Trollope wrote of The Bertrams: “I do not know that I have ever heard it well spoken of, even by my friends, and I cannot remember that there is any character in it that has dwelt in the minds of novel-readers.” That’s a fair assessment. Again it’s an inheritance plot, but this time involving a somewhat incongruous detour to the Holy Land.

The story comprises many people called Bertram, and most of them are unhappy. Bleak, boring and bloated.

As I wrote of Trollope in an earlier post: when he good he’s very, very good, but when he’s bad he’s terrible. Still, given he wrote 47 novels, they weren’t all going to be corkers. Also, it’s purely subjective, as I know there are readers who would staunchly defend some of the aforementioned novels. Trollope’s diversity is one of his great strengths, and it would be very dull if we all responded to his novels with one voice.

Please do let me know what you think.