Epilogue - Barsetshire via Selborne: Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)

Summary

The Epilogue returns us to Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne (1789) to illuminate the last novel in Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). We can better grasp Trollope’s novel of a geographically bounded fictional reality by remembering the way White established reverent natural history as a local and bounded subject deep into the nineteenth-century. Trollope’s Barsetshire Chronicles are likewise local and devoted to capturing an ecology: for Trollope the ecology is social, for White it is natural. Trollope’s provincial realism dilates upon the ordinary that is typical of natural history informed by a natural theological worldview, but is a distinctly different iteration of English provincial realism than Austen, Eliot, Kingsley, or Gaskell in that there is little description of nature; instead, Trollpe focuses on the human world of Barsetshire. The epilogue focuses on the novel’s absence of event or plotlessness as an extreme example of the focus on the everyday; in the form of the novel there is a persistent religiosity that is reflected as well in the thematic focus on Rev. Crawley’s marginality as expressed in scenes of walking and weather.