Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope
Third in the Chronicles of Barchester series
Originally published 1858
Category: Classics

You know what’s a downright crime? That Anthony Trollope isn’t a part of the typical English lit degree canon anymore (if he ever was, which honestly I don’t know and don’t feel like looking up). Forget the argument over whether canon is important or not; the point is that making the English degree even remotely universal and relevant from one university to another means having a list of books that you can point to and say “knowing about these texts makes you qualified to ask ‘Would you like fries with that?’” And Anthony Trollope just isn’t on that list. You’ll have to read books by at least two Bronte sisters, you’ll certainly have to read a handful of Dickens, but no general education literature class will put Trollope on the syllabus. Like I said, this is a crime, because Trollope is one of the most genuinely readable authors of the latter half of the 19th century, and for my money a whole lot more interesting than Dickens, who was paid by the word and had a thing for hard allegory. (I may be biased because I was assigned to read Dickens before I was mentally mature enough to appreciate his books. We’ll see what happens when the Rand-O-Matic churns out Hard Times later this year.)  In his own time, Trollope was even more prolific a writer than Dickens *and* had a full-time career with the postal service. He also invented the pillar box (for Americans, the equivalent of the blue public drop boxes we put mail in) and made a pile of money from his writing. Not bad for a guy who was, in his youth, a total slacker.

Trollope was also the first English novelist to write books that were serially related to each other. If you hate the proliferation of 12-volume-mega-novel-series, you can blame Anthony Trollope.  His two most popular series were the Palliser novels, which had a political bent, and the Barchester novels, which are closer to being novels of manners. I’ve enjoyed the first two books in the latter series, The Warden and Barchester Towers. Trollope is good with characterization and description, he understands the issues of the day, and he explains the workings of the Church of England in the mid-19th century well enough for a reader of the early 21st century to keep up with him. It’s not hard to get involved in the lives of his characters.

As good as they were, Doctor Thorne is even better. This is primarily because it’s the first book with a strong female protagonist. In the first two books, Trollope creates a number of strong women, but the protagonists are more retiring and sweet. Mary Thorne, niece of the title character, is intelligent, well-spoken, self-assured and progressive in her opinions about class and individual worth. Her uncle has a similar personality, and despite his being only a country doctor (and one who *gasp* mixes his own doses like a common apothecary!) he’s the close confidant of the local squire Franklin Gresham and far more popular among all the classes than his more arrogant medical peers. At the start of the novel, Mary has shared tutors with the Gresham daughters and feels no artificial inferiority to them or anyone else, including their snooty noble relatives the DeCourcys. In fact, her friendship for Frank Gresham the younger, only son and heir to Greshamville, has started to turn into something warmer. But Mary, despite all her certainties about her personal worth, has to keep Frank at a distance. She knows she is the daughter of Doctor Thorne’s dead brother, but she doesn’t know who her mother was or what her relations are. In that uncertainty, she can’t bring herself to fall in love with Frank—and Frank certainly shouldn’t fall in love with the penniless Mary, because it’s his duty to marry money and restore the family fortunes.

In writing this novel, Trollope reveals that he’s the true heir to Jane Austen in characterization, plot, and style. Trollope’s wit is a little broader, and he uses the technique of addressing the reader directly and commenting on his own words, which I think is fun. But he’s also got the social advantage of writing fifty years after Austen. You see, Mary is a bastard. And everyone knows it, or suspects it. But in the end, she isn’t ostracized by society, and her potential isn’t limited the way, for example, Harriet Smith’s is in Emma. For all the talk another fifty years on about how shocking Thomas Hardy was with Jude the Obscure, I really wonder what the Victorians thought about cheering for a penniless, “nameless” (that’s the polite way of saying “bastard”) heroine?

I’m a fan of Anthony Trollope now. And it’s exciting to know that there are so many more of his novels left for me to discover.