The Last Chronicle of Barset Read Free

the novel will reveal some plot details, which readers may not wish to learn so soon. If this is the case, they may wish to postpone reading this essay until they have finished the novel
.
    The Last Chronicle of Barset
is the last in a series of six books, collectively known as the Barsetshire novels. The action is centred in the fictional cathedral city of Barchester and the surrounding county, Barsetshire, with occasional forays to London. Most of the characters appear in more than one novel, some in several, with minor characters in one story taking a major role in the next. For example, Mr Crawley, a focal figure of
The Last Chronicle
, had featured previously as a minor character in
Framley Parsonage
, while Lily Dale, another important figure in this final Barsetshire novel, was also the centre of attention in
The Small House at Allington
.
    Trollope’s reputation was consolidated by the publication of the first three Barsetshire novels, so that upon his return to England from Ireland in 1859, he was respected, financially secure, and really accepted in the society of his native country for the first time in his life. It is interesting that at the height of his powers and popularity he should write
The Last Chronicle of Barset
which centres upon an impoverished clergyman who is a social outsider, almost an outcast, and who has been publicly shamed by an accusation of theft; a man so desperate as to question his own sanity and to consider suicide. Another character, Adolphus Crosbie, also contemplates suicide; yet another shoots himself in a fit of delirium tremens. Suicide, the approach of madness, a crime: these seem to belong to French fiction of the period, commonly regarded as more risqué than English, or in the sensation fiction of the 1860s, rather than in the work of a safe and hearty ‘beef and ale’ author. But the more astute of Trollope’s critics recognized that the simplicity, almost transparency, of his prose style, and the ‘safety’ of the fictional worlds that he created consistently and reassuringly over many volumes, lulled many readers intounderrating the complexity and the occasional darkness of his work. As a contemporary assessment of
The Last Chronicle
in the
London Review
argued, the ‘wonderful ease with which Mr Trollope writes, and the simplicity of the means with which he generally produces his effects, have induced some of his critics to underrate his powers, and to speak of him at times as if he were capable of doing little more than write excellent chit-chat, or analyse the mental vagaries of a young lady oscillating between two attachments’. 4
    The young lady in this novel is Lily Dale, whose story is continued three years after
The Small House at Allington
(1864) in both fictional and real time. Readers’ expectations were high, and curiosity as to Lily’s fate rife, as the weekly numbers of
The Last Chronicle
were published between December 1866 and July 1867: would she return to the man who had jilted her or, as so many hoped, would she reward the faithful and determined love of John Eames? Later in the novel Lily tells her engaged friend Emily Dunstable that ‘things have gone wrong’ with her (ch. 52 ), and that she cannot progress from her past with Crosbie to a future love with Eames. The fact that ‘things have gone wrong’ bespeaks a brokenness in Lily, an internal stoppage of time which prevents her from moving on after being jilted by the man in whom she had invested her future. But this does not mean that she stops all the clocks at twenty-to-nine to live in rooms of cobwebs and candlelight as does that other jilted woman, Dickens’s Miss Havisham. Instead Lily Dale will patiently pursue her ‘small house’ duties in Allington, decorating the church for festivals, bossing and being bossed by the gardener, and opening the post-bag at breakfast. Herein lies an important distinction between the melodramatic