The Last Chronicle of Barset

Worcester Cathedral, England

By Anthony Trollope, London, Penguin Books, 2002, p. 889

Anthony Trollope is the Victorian king of the mega-novel.  He wrote six novels about the fictional cathedral town of Barchester in the 1850s and 1860s in addition to a series of of novels about English political life called the Palliser novels.  Like Balzac's Comedie humaine, characters who appear in the foreground in one novel may reappear in another book in the background.  The mega-novel, according to Smiley, permits the author to explore a mileau in depth and to follow characters as they age.  The Last Chronicle of Barset centers on an impoverished country curate, Mr. Crawly, who inadvertently passes a bad check.  Crawly cannot remember how he happened to hold the check and fears he is either mad or a thief.  All of Barchester is consumed with the question of Crawly's guilt or innocence.

I must admit that I read Trollope with a divided heart.  He is a superb storyteller.  According to Smiley, "Trollope is a master at entering the minds of a variety of characters and showing how their thoughts progress, and also at showing how they are often deluding themselves or how their views of themselves contrast with the ways others see them."  I love his portraits of social networks.  Like Middlemarch and Alice Munro's work, he's telling the story of a community as well as individuals.  His novels are both deep (pictures of an individual soul) and wide (pictures of a interlocking social structures).  

He is, on the other hand, repulsively sexist and anti-Semitic.  I understand that his work is a product of its time, and its not fair to hold Trollope responsible for Victorian-era prejudices.  I still find it hard to tolerate.  Crawly is a domestic tyrant and unless a woman is a simpering fool, Crawly wants silence her!  Its like tucking in to a beautiful salad only to look down and see a worm waving up from the plate.