Trollope’s ‘Political’ Novels: Phineas Finn to The Duke’s Children

Abstract

In part, the Finn-Palliser series documents Trollope’s growing realisation that, as he put it himself in An Autobiography, ‘I could not make a tale pleasing chiefly, or perhaps in any part, by politics.’¹ Indeed, by the time he was writing the last two of his ‘political’ novels, he had virtually abandoned any hope of making such things as the details of parliamentary alignments, his own interest in election procedures and open ballot, or the arguments for and against ‘Mr Monk’s’ proposals for Ireland the primary materials for writing a novel.