The Top of the Greasy Pole: Prime Ministers and The Prime Minister

Abstract

After the failure of The Way We Live Now — which remained out of print from 1879 until 1941, so violent was the reaction against it — Trollope turned back to more familiar, and to what he hoped would be more congenial, scenes. But instead the result was more controversy; rather than restoring him to the good graces of the reading public, The Prime Minister (published serially November 1875–June 1876 and in four volumes in May 1876) received an explosive reception and gave Trollope the worst press he had ever had for a major work. As in the case of The Way We Live Now, however, modern opinion has reversed that of the 1870s; The Prime Minister has become a favorite subject (if not always a favorite novel) of the Pallisers’ modern critics and one of Trollope’ s most written-about works. True, only two decades ago it could be said of The Prime Minister that, as Trollope’s contemporaries had refused to read the novel, so in recent years it had been read “only by those few enthusiasts who will settle for nothing less than all of Trollope.”¹ But every major study of Trollope published in, the last ten years has devoted considerable space to The Prime Minister; it has become, like The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Eustace Diamonds, and The Way We Live Now, one of those novels critics feel they cannot pass over — it is too rich, too full, too interesting.

‘It is all nothing unless one can go to the very top.’

Phineas Finn

To be popular one must be a mediocrity.

Oscar Wilde

Men with large aims cannot afford to be scrupulous in small details.

Gissing, Demos (1886)

The Duke … is the T. E. Lawrence of Trollope’ s political scene.

A. O. J. Cockshut