Dr Thorne

PENGUIN        CLASSICS

DOCTOR THORNE

ANTHONY TROLLOPE was born in london in 1815 and died in 1882. his father was a barrister who went bankrupt, and the family was maintained by his mother, Frances, who resourcefully in later life became a bestselling writer. He received little education and his childhood generally seems to have been an unhappy one.

Trollope enjoyed considerable acclaim as a novelist during his lifetime, publishing over forty novels and many short stories, at the same time following a notable career as a senior civil servant in the Post Office. The Warden (1855), the first of his novels to achieve success, was succeeded by the sequence of ’Barsetshire’ novels, Barchester Towers (1857), Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), The Small House at Allington (1864) and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). This series, regarded by some as Trollope’s masterpiece, demonstrates his imaginative grasp of the great preoccupation of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century English novels – property – and features a gallery of recurring characters, including, among others, Archdeacon Grantly, the worldly cleric, the immortal Mrs Proudie and the saintly warden, Septimus Harding. Almost equally popular were the six brilliant Palliser novels comprising Can You Forgive Her? (1864), Phineas Finn (1869), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Phineas Redux (1874), The Prime Minister (1876) and The Duke’s Children (1880).

Trollope has been acclaimed as a supreme portraitist of the professional and landed classes of mid-Victorian England. His early novels depict, with irony and wit, the comfortable world of the English gentry, contrasting the apparent stability of rural life with the harsh, disturbing rhythms of London. In his later work Trollope’s rural order has given way to the values of industrial society, and his tone is generally gloomier and more pessimistic.

RUTH RENDELL, novelist and crime writer, has written more than forty books both in her own name and under her pseudonym, barbara Vine. Apart from fiction, she is the author of Ruth Rendell’s Suffolk and has edited and introduced a selection of the short stories of the Victorian ghost-story writer and antiquarian M. R. James under the tide A Warning to the Curious. She regularly reviews books for the Daily Telegraph. Ruth Rendell holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Essex. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE
Doctor Thorne

with an Introduction and Notes by

RUTH RENDELL

PENGUIN BOOK

PENGUIN BOOK

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 1858
This edition published in Penguin Classics 1991
Reprinted with a Chronology 2004
14

Introduction and notes copyright © Kingsmarkham Enterprises Limited, 1991 All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

EISBN: 978–0–141–90496–2

Contents

Introduction

Chronology

DOCTOR THORNE

Notes

Introduction

WHILE writing Doctor Thorne Trollope was sent abroad. His destination was Egypt, where as a Post Office surveyor he was to make a treaty with the Pasha for the transport of the mails through that country by railway. The sea voyage from Marseilles to Alexandria was rough. More than once nausea overcame him and he had to leave his paper on the cabin table and rush to his stateroom. ‘It was February,’ he wrote in An Autobiography, ‘and the weather was miserable; but still I did my work.’

He was in the habit of writing in trains. If it had been possible, he would no doubt have written while riding his horse. He was hardly ever without a pen in his hand, though he put his work as a civil servant first. The man who was responsible for putting pillarboxes on our streets, he had first been in Ireland but in 1851 was sent home on a special job concerned with the rural delivery of letters. On horseback he rode about the West of England and Wales and ‘had an opportunity of seeing a considerable portion of Great Britain, with a minuteness which few have enjoyed’. Novelist that he already was, he was to use the knowledge of human nature and the rural scene thus gained in his fiction and to discover his potential.

By this time he had published three books, none of which had brought him success or any money. But in the course of this new job, while visiting Salisbury and walking about near the cathedral, he was struck by an idea for a story of clerical life. ‘From whence,’ he wrote, ‘came that series of novels of which Barchester, with its bishops, deans and archdeacons, was the central site.’ The public liked The Warden and it liked Barchester Towers, and for years to come these two novels brought him a small annual income. But before returning to Barchester it was of his own experiences as a junior clerk that he wrote in a piece of semi-autobiographical fiction called The Three Clerks. This completed, he was on holiday in Florence with his brother when for some reason not disclosed he asked him to suggest a plot. It was the only occasion on which he had recourse to another’s imagination for the thread of a story. The plot that Thomas Trollope offered him was that of Doctor Thorne.

Trollope himself had little to say about this novel, though more than twenty years later he noted that he believed it to be the most popular book that he had ever written. He finished it in Egypt and began work on The Bertrams on the following day.