The Three Clerks

If you like Jane Austen, you'll like Anthony Trollope, and this one is hard to find at libraries--though one of the author's own favorites. I think it was John Updike who said he envied Trollope his way of putting real life "under glass" to convey every detail of his characters and their world.

Trollope covers broad range of life in this wonderfully amusing tale of three very diverse clerks and the career paths they take in Victorian England. He depicts them with depth and sympathy and you can't help feeling sorry for the plights their own follies bring upon them. Trollope knew the life he wrote about from his own eventful and long remembered career as a postal worker! Romance and vivid scene painting combine with social comentary to make Three Clerks a classic worth reading for pleasure as well as for the cultural history education it offers.