Via an analysis of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series, this chapter argues that character – the notion that a person’s value is defined by attributes of character – was the dominant value form shaping novelistic poetics under the nineteenth-century industrial economy. Trollope’s novels bear witness to the growing influence of financial transactions in the British economy. Upon first glance, Trollope’s critique of finance capital is fairly well worn, embedded as it is in anti-Semitic and xenophobic tropes, but this chapter focuses on how the financial narratives in Can You Forgive Her? (1864) and The Prime Minister (1876) cast finance capital as an affront to the very logic of character as a novelistic value form. In those novels, we begin to see the unraveling of character, which opens up the possibility for another literary value form to emerge under modernism.

A key feature of the novel of ideas is the prominent role of debates between characters that stage political, philosophical, and ideological differences. Often seen as an especially artificial feature of the genre, character-character dialogue is typically contrasted unfavorably with indirect speech and narratorial description of psychological states. This opposition plays into an implicitly modernism-valorizing view and, ultimately, a privileging of the representation and analysis of thought over the representation of speech. As such, it dovetails in an interesting way with a consequential divide within literary history between idea-driven narrative and an allegedly more nuanced psychological and moral realism. Refusing this opposition, this essay considers nineteenth-century novelistic approaches to moral and political ideas around equality and justice through a complex lens involving the interplay between ruminative states and moments of punctual character-character dialogue. Authors discussed include Henry James, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot.

Chapter 6 returns to William Thackeray’s Mediterranean travel writing to show how his humor fails to challenge the dominant heritage discourse in Jerusalem. Although Thackeray derides other Mediterranean sites for inauthenticity, he cannot profane Jerusalem, which means he cannot return it to human (and imperial) use, either by word play or physical contact. Anthony Trollope takes up this problem in his novel The Bertrams, in which he reconceives some places, like Alexandria, for modern use. These sites are wiped of their significance to British heritage discourse as ancient lands and rendered available for modernization. Jerusalem, though, proves too sacred, and thus too integral to British cultural heritage, to be colonized in the same way. Some holy sites thus endure as historical relics while others are rewritten as a “middle” East.

This chapter considers the ways in which Anthony Trollope at first defied but eventually exemplified alternate ideas of creativity for successive generations. With the appearance of each of his books, contemporaries acknowledged his almost continuous labor. Later critics agreed, using more psychological terms: If Trollope was a genius, his sort of genius bordered on automatism: habitual, lacking in forethought, and suspiciously unbeholden to inspiration. Through the first half of the twentieth century, Trollope’s writing process (as described in An Autobiography) and his prose were implicitly evaluated against two dichotomies permeating behavioral studies: The first pits introspection against habit, and the second sets remote against inhibited associations. Each dichotomy poses an invidious distinction between the first and second terms. An evaluation of Trollope’s composition and style within this framework yields differing models of creative writing.

Although liberals and conservatives tended to disagree about the specific ways in which the franchise might be expanded, both parties accepted by 1860 that reform was inevitable. Yet to whom should the vote be extended and on what basis? These questions animated discussions within and outside the House of Commons. They also informed significant works of nonfiction in this decade, including several of John Stuart Mill’s most important writings, as well poetry and fiction, including many of Anthony Trollope’s parliamentary novels. This chapter constellates Mill’s speculative thought and Trollope’s fiction in order to consider the persistent tensions between thought and feeling that are constitutive features of Victorian liberalism itself.

John Ruskin and Karl Marx – two heterodox economic thinkers writing in England in the 1860s – both considered production, circulation, and exchange in relation to the natural environment. After first discussing the imbrication of the economic and the ecological in their work, this chapter turns to George Eliot’s Felix Holt [GK19](1866) and Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm [GK20](1861–62) to explore points of intersection between heterodox economic thought and literary realism. Focusing on soil fertility, an issue that evokes the uses of water, soil, and manure in service of capitalism, the chapter shows that Eliot and Trollope trace the ways in which ownership, labor, or trade transforms humans’ relations to animals, plants, and landscapes. Heterodox economic thought and literary realism in the 1860s took into account historical dimensions of the natural world, especially its economic involvement.

Well, if things could talk then I’m sure you’d hear A lot of things to make you cry, my dear. Ain’t you glad, Oh, ain’t you glad, Ain’t you glad, Glad that things don’t talk?

The founding fathers of English literature, Chaucer and Shakespeare, bequeathed a range of possible attitudes to Jews and Judaism. These can be found in the ambivalent figure of “the Jew” – malign and benign, medieval and modern – in much 19th- and 20th-century English literature, from the romantic poets to imperial writers, and from realist novelists to modernist writers of all kinds. The essay contextualizes these changing attitudes and ends with Graham Greene, George Orwell, and Margaret Drabble.

This chapter further develops the case for the novel's usefulness as a fictional reality by examining two claims of Anthony Trollope's Autobiography: that this novel-writing developed out of a paracosmic play practice he called ‘castle-building’, and that he made up his novel plots as he wrote them. Through an analysis of his and the De Quinceys’ games, I point out how the improvisational nature of play – the virtual world is ‘filled in’ and revised over time with little premeditation – as an obvious analogue to Trollope’s construction of the fictional Barsetshire, and to his plotting of individual novels. I argue that the characters of The Small House at Allington behave improvisationally, inventing, revising, and ‘filling in’ their personhoods as they go along, offering an alternative reading of the moral logic and psychology in Trollope’s realism. For Trollope, the novel is distinctive for providing this experience of fictional living, not as ‘mere’ escapism but as it contributes concretely to the reader’s experience of their own world.

Chapter Seven marks a turn away from consideration of ways in which the material presence of the map bears upon authorial and readerly meaning-making, to ways in which the absence, or internalisation, of the map affects the reader’s engagement with the text. Literary mapping is unusual by comparison with maps in other disciplines, in that the question of why a map is not present, or is withheld, can be of as much interest as its presence. This chapter addresses a question that implicitly emerges from the earlier chapters: why do maps occur so frequently in popular genres but extremely infrequently in canonical texts (especially the realist novel)? After exploring this issue through debates around realism and representation in France and Britain, the chapter considers two rare canonical authors who do use maps in relation to the realist novel: Trollope and Hardy. (141)

The principles of political economy that informed the Russell government’s measures to terminate the Famine crisis were broadly addressed in journalism, political and economic pamphlets, but also in literature. As this chapter shows, fiction, in particular, engaged with three aspects of political economy: the government’s politics of non intervention, the Malthusian discourses that many supporters of political economy employed and the stereotype of Irish indolence by which the ideology of political economy was often imbued. As will be demonstrated, the fact that these works of literature responded to these societal discussions on the Irish Question is accompanied by generic shifts. In examining the Famine present or past, these literary texts explored the boundaries of genre, developing new fictional registers and forms.

This chapter argues that the 1850s Australian gold rushes profoundly challenged the stadialist developmental logic underpinning political economy and novelistic realism. An initial response, Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever (1854), cast gold digging in the language of romance, associated with financial speculation and social upheaval, and imagined the restoration of the stadialist norms of cultivation and culture. The emergence in Australia of the need for a new theory of subjectivity and society can be seen in W. E. Hearn’s Plutology: or, The Theory of the Efforts to Satisfy Human Wants (1864), which abandoned stadialism and labor in favor of a model of consumption based upon individual desire. The formal impact of such insights is also evident in works by metropolitan writers who had previously encountered the gold rushes. W. S. Jevons’ path-breaking “marginalist” Theory of Political Economy (1871) and Anthony Trollope’s sensation novel John Caldigate (1878-79) both center upon and normativize a British subject defined by desire, and through this contribute to a newly deterritorialized understanding of British subjectivity.

This chapter argues that a formal logic of “speculative utopianism” emerged in New Zealand by the 1870s, linking the idea of the settler colony as the future of British identity with the promise that it would reward metropolitan financial investment. The emergence of this logic can be seen in Samuel Butler’s First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863) and Erewhon (1872), which formalize the association between culture, investment, and settler futurity. The stakes of speculative utopianism were intensified as the colony acquired unprecedented levels of debt, the outcome of a policy to spur development that colonial premier Julius Vogel grounded in claims about the colony’s future potential as an ideal British society. The collapse of New Zealand’s credit led metropolitan writers to attack the assumptions of speculative utopianism, most notably in Trollope’s dystopian The Fixed Period (1882). Two fin de siècle works of speculative utopianism—Vogel’s Anno Domini 2000 (1889) and H. C. Marriott Watson’s Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1890)—reveal a further shift in the status of the settler empire, as the future value of the settler population is now cast in geopolitical terms.

In the 1880s, the New York-based Century Magazine was a regular home for Henry James’s fiction and criticism. His first major intervention on the theory of fiction in the magazine is his July 1883 essay on Anthony Trollope (published over a year before Century printed his now canonical consideration ‘The Art of Fiction’). The essay represents, perhaps unsurprisingly, a highly nuanced view of the literary scene in which allegiances circle and return and reputations are diminished and then rebuilt. Trollope’s posthumously-published autobiography appeared three months after James’s essay and seemed to confirm many of the latter’s anxieties about the business of writing. This chapter explores James’s contorted reading of Trollope as a literary precursor who is both criticised for his immoderate, promiscuous productivity and, at the same time, recuperated as a moderate sensibility standing opposed to the scientific avant-gardism of the French naturalist tradition. By exploring the complex national allegiances of an American author writing in a proudly American journal about a recently-deceased, and highly popular, English novelist, I consider the ways in which James attempts to carve out for himself a transatlantic space where the metaphoric possibilities of moderation and its antonyms find a restless purchase.

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.