Trollope shared one belief with most other Victorians that many people today might now regard as quaint: he believed that the novel, or whatever the current form of popular story-telling might be, should be morally uplifting; it should teach the reader something about how to be a better human being. However, as we have observed through our discussion today, preachiness and outrage have little part in his teaching method. Instead, he relies on humor and even-handedness in service to his central message: sympathy, benevolence, and understanding toward fellow human beings.

In the early 1990s, interest in Trollope increased. A Trollope Society flourishes in the United Kingdom, as does its sister society in the United States. [78] In 2011, the University of Kansas's Department of English, in collaboration with the Hall Center for the Humanities and in partnership with The Fortnightly Review, began awarding an annual Trollope Prize. The Prize was established to focus attention on Trollope's work and career.a b c d e f Pollard, Arthur (2016) [1978]. Anthony Trollope. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-21198-3. OCLC 954490289. Both friends and enemies alike urge him to stay where he is, but he cannot live with the thought that the money which provides his generous income might rightly belong to the twelve paupers whose care is his raison d’etre as warden.

We do not even know if Reverend Harding’s salary is a legitimate outcome of Hiram’s will or not – because even the Queen’s Council does not come to any conclusion on the matter. The most important legal and financial issue underpinning the story is simply left unexamined.Tingay, Lance O. (1951). "The Reception of Trollope's First Novel", Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 195–200. In the mid nineteenth century there were a number of financial scandals in the Church of England including those of Rochester, where the endowments which should have supported the King’s School Canterbury had been diverted to the Dean and Chapter; and of the hospital of St Cross at Winchester where the Rev. Francis North, later the Earl of Guildford, had been appointed to the mastership of the hospital by his father the bishop. The revenues of the hospital were very considerable, the work involved minimal. The scandal soon broke. These writers seem to be reaching out to readers in friendship, trying to make a direct connection from writ Like other Victorian realists, Trollope sought to portray people as complex “mixed” characters, with good, bad, and indifferent characteristics all mixed in. As a result, we never completely hate even the more dislikable characters in Trollope. Trollope’s Genial Narrator in Action As a major landowner the church had (and still has) vast reservoirs of wealth which it used to pay its clergy, all of which the novel makes fairly clear. And some of the positions they held are largely sinecures. Indeed, part of the warden’s moral dilemma is not just that he is receiving a large annual salary to which he might not be legally entitled, but that he receives this salary for doing next to nothing.