Trollope’s Idea of the Gentleman

Abstract

‘No English novelist ever had this sense [for the minute social gradations] more subtly attuned than Trollope. Think of the interplay between the Greshams and the Courcys or the Pallisers and Frank Tregear. There wasn’t a step between the lower-middle class and the highest aristocracy that he didn’t know by instinct.’ Thus C. P. Snow in an essay on ‘Dickens and the Public Service’.¹ Jane Austen had no doubt about the social distinctions between these extremes, but everybody is ‘middle-class’ now. The extent of change that had already taken place between her time and theirs was disturbingly evident to sensitive Victorians, not least to Trollope and not least in what it was that constituted a gentleman.