Framley Parsonage Read Free Page A

and up-to-date, and this combination accountsfor the simultaneous nostalgia and excitement which greeted the series. The first of the Barsetshire novels,
The Warden
, was published in 1855, and the story relates to events during Aberdeen’s coalition government of 1852–5. The central issue in
The Warden
arises from topical cases about the administration of charitable trusts at Rochester, Dulwich and Winchester, and the novel contains a satireon an obscure Parliamentary bill entitled the ‘Recovery of Personal Liberty in Certain Cases Bill’, debated in June 1853, as well as parodies of recent works by Dickens and Carlyle. Palmerston formed a government in 1855, and this occurs in fictional analogy at the opening of
Barchester Towers
, which was written in 1855–6 and published in 1857. This second novel is just as topical, with referencesto University reform, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and the visit of the Begum of Oude in 1856, alongside an awareness in the characters of the controversies of the day about German scholarship, and about the ‘plurality of worlds’ or the possibility of life on other planets.
Doctor Thorne
and
Framley Parsonage
have stories which are less directly involved in politics but which show the sameclose awareness of current affairs in a mass of details.
    The Warden
established the cathedral city of Barchester and its clergy, while the next two novels spread out into half the surrounding county to include the principal landowners, churchmen and other professional men, with
Framley Parsonage
effectively completing the fictional county. By this time Trollope was using a map to ensure consistencyin his presentation of Barsetshire, with all its parishes, roads, railways, postal services and so on, and with the completion of two further novels,
The Small House at Allington
(1862–3) and
The Last Chronicle of Barset
(1866–7), hisrendering of well-to-do life in an entire county was unprecedent-edly thorough. Indeed George Eliot is on record as saying that she was encouraged to attempt
Middlemarch
by the detailed geographical and social complexity of Trollope’s novels, while Tolstoy must have had these qualities in mind when he later wrote, ‘Trollope kills me with his mastery.’ 18 There can be no doubt that Trollope has an important place in the development of the realistic novel in the nineteenth century.
    As far as English fiction was concerned, Trollope was the leading exponent of whatwas often called ‘realism’ in the sixties, with its rejection of intricate plot in favour of ‘truth to life’, and its insistence that sensational effects should give the impression of arising ‘naturally’ out of character interaction, rather than that the characters should seem to be constructed for the sake of the effects. When
Framley Parsonage
started to appear its greatest rival as a serialwas Wilkie Collins’s
The Woman in White
, which had been featuring weekly in
All the Year Round
for five or six weeks. Incidentally, with unaccustomed carelessness, George Smith had let the book rights of this novel slip through his fingers, and so missed cornering two of the sensations of 1860. The two serials ran side-by-side until the end of August, to enormous acclaim, and, as
The Woman inWhite
was followed by a host of imitators, the two novels came to represent the two dominant modes of English fiction in the decade. Writing in the early eighteen seventies in his
Autobiography
, Trollope puts the matter with a characteristic blend of seriousness and tongue-in-cheek:
    Among English novels of the present day, and among English novelists, a great division is made. There are sensationalnovels and anti-sensational, sensational novelists and anti-sensational: sensational readers and anti-sensational. The novelists who are considered to be anti-sensational are generally called realistic. I am realistic. My friend Wilkie Collins is generally supposed to be sensational. The readers who prefer the one are