Of the two books, ‘I myself think that they are of about equal merit,’ he said, ‘but that neither of them is good… The plot of Doctor Thorne is good, and I am led therefore to suppose that a good plot – which, to my own feeling, is the most insignificant part of a tale – is mat which will most raise it or most condemn it in the public judgement… That of The Bertrams was more than ordinarily bad; and as the book was relieved by no special character, it failed. Its failure never surprised me; – but I have been surprised by the success of Doctor Thorne.’

Authors are often poor judges of their own work. Trollope considered the often tedious Phineas Finn and the very nearly unreadable Nina Balatka better novels than The Eustace Diamonds and The Small House at Allington. The kindest adjective applicable to The Bertrams is ‘unmemorable’, while its immediate predecessor was quickly judged by the public for the fine drama of wealth and wedlock it is, yet he saw no difference in merit between them.

Michael Sadlei, classifying Trollope’s novels and stories, gave Doctor Thorne three stars, an order of merit awarded to only four more out of all the fifty-one pieces of fiction. Of these he wrote, ‘There is not a loose end, not a patch of drowsiness, not a moment of false proportion.’1* It is hard to understand why it was disliked by its author. Perhaps the reason lay in the fact that the plot was not his own, or perhaps it was not suffidendy experimental for him. Trollope, not always felicitously, enjoyed writing of new or exotic places, introducing the occasional villainous foreigner, and believed, quite erroneously, that inserting a facetious sub-plot enhanced his fiction.

Happily for us today, there is none of that in Doctor Thorne. It is remarkable, if not unique, among his fiction for the absence in its chapters of convolutions and long-winded digressions. Here are no comic servants, no bibulous commercial travellers, as we find in the political fiction, no taproom wits or well-heeled jolly widows, only a modicum of rustic electioneering and not a single hunt. It is tempting to wonder if these may be among the reasons for what, to its author, was its unaccountable popularity.

There are few clergymen either, for, though in Barsetshire, for the first time in the series we are far from the cathedral city of Barchester. The novel, therefore, stands alone and can be read without a prior knowledge of its two predecessors. Doctor Thorne is complete in itself, Victorian in period if not always in spirit, set almost in the centre of the century, in an unspoiled pastoral countryside and, for the most part, among a landowning upper class.

It has been said that few writers have more than two or three characters inside them and that all the personages they create must be variations on one or other of these. If this is so, Trollope had rather more than his share and drew on a source supply of nearer ten. Because Doctor Thorne was written quite early in his career as a novelist he was here able to introduce new and fresh prototypes. Character was all-important to him; it was by far the most important constituent of his fiction, of greater significance than construction, theme, plot, the inner life or any possible exposition of the human condition. ‘If he was in any degree a man of genius (and I hold that he was),’ wrote Henry James soon after Trollopc’s death, ‘it was in virtue of this happy, instinctive perception of human varieties. His knowledge of the stuff we are made of, his observation of the common behaviour of men and women, was not reasoned or acquired, or even particularly studied. All human beings deeply interested him, human life, to his mind, was a perpetual story.’2 If anything rivalled it, an earnest desire to disseminate moral values would be that rival.

‘A novel should give a picture of common life,’ Trollope himself wrote, ‘enlivened by humour and sweetened by pathos. To make that picture worthy of attention the canvas should be crowded with real portraits, not of individuals known to the world or the author, but of created personages impregnated with traits of character which are known. To my thinking, the plot is but the vehicle for all this; and when you have the vehicle without the passengers, a story of mystery in which the agents never spring to life, you have but a wooden show.’

Thomas Trollope’s plot was a simple one. A rich man makes a will, leaving everything he possesses, if his dissolute son dies before the age of twenty-five, to his sister’s eldest child. Neither the sex nor the name of this child is specified. One person only knows it: the guardian and most affectionate uncle of the legatee, who, sworn to secrecy, watches her made an outcast by the society in which she lives. Illegitimate and apparently poor, she must be prevented at all costs from marrying the heir to ‘the first commoner in Barsetshire’. All his family is ranged against her, until, that is, her good fortune is known.

Suspense was not a quality which Trollope valued. In The Eustace Diamonds he wrote that ‘the chronicler’ scorns to ‘keep from his reader any secret that is known to himself’, and at the end of the fifteenth chapter of Barchester Towers, ‘Our doctrine is, that the author and reader shall move along in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe is never dignified.’

He said of the art of Wilkie Collins that his was ‘a branch which I have not myself at all cultivated’ and thus gives everything away in his early chapters, so that the reader knows from the first the parentage of Mary Thorne. There is never any mystery about the seduction of her mother by the dissolute brother of the doctor. It is a tribute to Trollope’s powers as a storyteller that this matters not at all. We know from the start that there is a very good chance of a happy ending, and this radier enhances our enjoyment of the novel, providing a curious smug satisfaction in observing the upright conduct of some characters and the short-sighted folly of others, a pervading I-told-you-so sensation that increases with the continual fulfilment of prophecy.