Introduction

Abstract

Trollope the high Victorian has gradually given way to Trollope the novelist for our time — more modern than he could have foreseen, more pertinent to the way we live now than many readers have understood: these are the persuasions of such critics as Ruth apRoberts and James Kincaid. Mrs apRoberts’s book has an American title (The Moral Trollope),¹ but the more sensitively pun-minded English publishers evidently decided that the book should be entirely unambiguous: hence Trollope: Artist and Moralist. Both titles, however, indicate the direction of the author’s interest, which is to justify Trollope by insisting that his moral preoccupations are complex and prescient. James Kincaid, in The Novels of Anthony Trollope, offers analysis of novelistic technique intended to demonstrate that Trollope is equally the practitioner of what Kincaid calls the Augustan form and by an inner logic the herald of the open form: the pastoral world of Barsetshire gives way to the uncertainties of the Palliser world; as Trollope becomes increasingly bleak he moves in spirit nearer to our own age. Meanwhile, and by what may be seen as a development from another direction, the task of relating Trollope to the decades following the Crimean war, proceeds apace.