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Mr Scarborough is a crafty landowner whose object is to protect his sons and his property (not necessarily in that order), and in doing so he's very willing to use chicanery. Captain Mountjoy Scarborough is a gambler, who's in the clutches of half the usurers in England; Augustus Scarborough is a lawyer; both brothers like the idea of marrying their cousin Florence Mountjoy; Florence in turn prefers Harry Annesley, who is heir to his uncle the Squire of Buston but is utterly dependent on his uncle's will. When Mountjoy is declared illegitimate - and subsequently disappears entirely off the scene - this throws all sorts of cats among a cage of predatory birds. And, when dispatched off to Belgium with her stern mother, Florence picks up two additional suitors due to intense charisma and grace...
Overall, this novel along with other works cements the idea that Trollope is not in favour of cousin marrying cousin.
It's necessary to warn that the book uses anti-Semitic descriptors to portray the money-lenders, though these characters are a small part of the story and the worst characters in the book are not Jewish.
The book contains a set of love-letters sent through the post; this correspondence is well written and sucessfully emotive without descending into cliche.
Dorothy Grey, like Isabel Brodrick in COUSIN HENRY, is a female character who would blatantly be a success as a career woman (were this only common in her era). Miss Grey would make a wonderful lawyer. Her father is a lawyer and she provides him with a lot of advice that he uses; she is effectively the silent partner of his firm. Like Isabel, Dorothy also has a stern quixotic sense of ethics and always attempts to do the right thing by the people around her, though she is more pitiless than Isabel. In her thirties, Dorothy seems a fairly determined old maid - to little to no lesbian subtext, I think - but her life is interesting and satisfying to her. (Todd and Baker of Littlebath are about the strongest that Trollope gets with femslash potential; most of his female characters have their emotional lives devoted to family members or male love interests.) Mr Grey is Mr Scarborough's lawyer and he tries his best to lead an ethical life despite practicing for unethical clients. This novel takes a less black-and-white approach to ORLEY FARM in its coverage of lawyers, lying clients, and moral ambiguities.
The ethical issues between the Scarboroughs and other characters are interestingly and, I think, satisfyingly covered. Selfishness is the worst sin; selfless love for a person beside yourself is something good, even if the only one you really love is your dead mother; and beyond that, it's still better to apply a sophisticated general morality that doesn't limit its focus to a family circle. This view on selfishness strikes me with its resemblance to Jane Austen - she's also very strong on condemning selfish people, even selfish people who don't do many actively malicious things.
Mountjoy's gambling addiction reads as quite modern. He knows "that if I got the money into my own hand it would be gone to-morrow. I should be off to Monte Carlo like a shot; and, of course it would go after the other." There's good human psychology here. Humans haven't changed and I felt this aspect of the novel to be very strong.
The ending of the novel drags a little, but overall leads into interesting character development. Trollope's able to recapture the emotional intensity. Peter Prosper, the Squire of Buston, is another example of Trollope's sympathetic, complex older characters whose inner lives and feelings are complicated and important. The young lovers, Harry Annesley and Florence Mountjoy, fulfil their plot function and the reader's interest with their romance, although being young they just haven't had the chances to gain the depth of experience as the older characters' complexities.
A reader is certainly left with an appreciation for Mr Scarborough's utter genius at subverting the law to live his own life. There's a good plot here. This is one of Trollope's last novels and it's got a lot going for it.
Here is a linguistic point I thought interesting: "as widely as he misunderstood hers [her character]" is a quote from the novel. I'd thought that the expression was wildly misunderstood, but I was widely wrong. ('Wildly' has a certain evocative metaphor to it, but it is not customary.) This is what Google Ngram Viewer has to show me:
The more you know. :)
Overall, this novel along with other works cements the idea that Trollope is not in favour of cousin marrying cousin.
It's necessary to warn that the book uses anti-Semitic descriptors to portray the money-lenders, though these characters are a small part of the story and the worst characters in the book are not Jewish.
The book contains a set of love-letters sent through the post; this correspondence is well written and sucessfully emotive without descending into cliche.
Dorothy Grey, like Isabel Brodrick in COUSIN HENRY, is a female character who would blatantly be a success as a career woman (were this only common in her era). Miss Grey would make a wonderful lawyer. Her father is a lawyer and she provides him with a lot of advice that he uses; she is effectively the silent partner of his firm. Like Isabel, Dorothy also has a stern quixotic sense of ethics and always attempts to do the right thing by the people around her, though she is more pitiless than Isabel. In her thirties, Dorothy seems a fairly determined old maid - to little to no lesbian subtext, I think - but her life is interesting and satisfying to her. (Todd and Baker of Littlebath are about the strongest that Trollope gets with femslash potential; most of his female characters have their emotional lives devoted to family members or male love interests.) Mr Grey is Mr Scarborough's lawyer and he tries his best to lead an ethical life despite practicing for unethical clients. This novel takes a less black-and-white approach to ORLEY FARM in its coverage of lawyers, lying clients, and moral ambiguities.
The ethical issues between the Scarboroughs and other characters are interestingly and, I think, satisfyingly covered. Selfishness is the worst sin; selfless love for a person beside yourself is something good, even if the only one you really love is your dead mother; and beyond that, it's still better to apply a sophisticated general morality that doesn't limit its focus to a family circle. This view on selfishness strikes me with its resemblance to Jane Austen - she's also very strong on condemning selfish people, even selfish people who don't do many actively malicious things.
Mountjoy's gambling addiction reads as quite modern. He knows "that if I got the money into my own hand it would be gone to-morrow. I should be off to Monte Carlo like a shot; and, of course it would go after the other." There's good human psychology here. Humans haven't changed and I felt this aspect of the novel to be very strong.
The ending of the novel drags a little, but overall leads into interesting character development. Trollope's able to recapture the emotional intensity. Peter Prosper, the Squire of Buston, is another example of Trollope's sympathetic, complex older characters whose inner lives and feelings are complicated and important. The young lovers, Harry Annesley and Florence Mountjoy, fulfil their plot function and the reader's interest with their romance, although being young they just haven't had the chances to gain the depth of experience as the older characters' complexities.
A reader is certainly left with an appreciation for Mr Scarborough's utter genius at subverting the law to live his own life. There's a good plot here. This is one of Trollope's last novels and it's got a lot going for it.
Here is a linguistic point I thought interesting: "as widely as he misunderstood hers [her character]" is a quote from the novel. I'd thought that the expression was wildly misunderstood, but I was widely wrong. ('Wildly' has a certain evocative metaphor to it, but it is not customary.) This is what Google Ngram Viewer has to show me:
The more you know. :)
