Rachel Ray

One must make allowences for the occasional sloppiness of Trollope's writing, given the serialized format and the incredible number of novels he wrote while working full-time for the post office. He always has something important to say and usually says it well. This novel is one of his shortest and one of his best. Like George Elliot and Charles Dickens, Trollope was dragged kicking and screaming into industrialized England in the 19th century. And, like them, he saw beneath the glitz and glamor of new-found wealth and the breakdown in social classes that followed the Reform movement in England. He seems at times to be overly preoccupied with the demise of the "lady" and the "gentleman," but this concern reveals a well-founded alarm over the vanishing of such Victorian values as "nobility" and "duty to others." In this novel he expresses many of those concerns while targetting the Evangelicals, an attack that is right-on and timely indeed. He reveals the hypocrisy of so many of those who are filled with resentment and hatred of their fellow humans while professing to bask in the love of Christ. I would rate this novel, alongside The Warden, as first-rate and excellent ways to come to Anthony Trollope, who is, in my view, a vastly under-rated writer, despite his flaws.