To create this kind of atmosphere was Trollope’s special forte, and it is never seen at greater advantage than in the Barsetshire novels.

As an alternative tide, he tells us in the first chapter, we may if we so desire have The life and Loves of Francis Newbold Gresham – that is, if a middle-aged medical man is not acceptable as hero. That Thomas Thorne – named perhaps for his progenitor, Anthony’s brother Thomas? – is far from unacceptable soon emerges; his combination of an advanced liberalism with a secret snobbery is interesting in itself, and he has ‘within him an inner, stubborn, self-admiring pride… a special pride in keeping his pride silently to himself’. Though not himself a parent, he has that quality seen in the best of Trollope’s fathers, a peculiar womanly sweetness and tenderness towards their girl children. But he is a strong man. He stands up to everyone. He is just and high-principled. In our day the general practitioner, which is more or less what Dr Thorne was, is one of the most respected members of the community. It was not always so. Were it not for the Thorne of Ullathorne blood, it is doubtful if the doctor would even have dined at Greshamsbury. As it is, he is there on a kind of sufferance, but nevertheless he champions his niece with passion when Frank’s mother pronounces a sentence of exile on her.

‘Do you think that I will break bread in a house from whence she has been ignominiously banished? Do you think that I can sit down in friendship with those who have spoken of her as you have now spoken? You have many daughters; what would you say if I accused one of them as you have accused her?’

‘Accused, doctor! No, I don’t accuse her. But prudence, you know, does sometimes require us –’

‘Very well; prudence requires you to look after those who belong to you; and prudence also requires me to look after my one lamb. Good morning, Lady Arabella.’

The doctor is brave. He is chivalrous and gallant, generous and shrewd. He would fulfil nearly all the requirements of a hero were Frank Gresham less handsome, less charming and less obviously heroic than he is. But Frank is probably the most attractive young male protagonist Trollope ever created.

If the preceding Barsetshire novels have heroes at all, they must be the priggish John Bold of The Warden, marked for an early death, and the maidenly don of Bereitester Towers, Francis Arabin, whom Bold’s widow will marry. So many of those who may be more accurately called the young male leads in the novels that follow either share what Trollope himself called a ‘hobbledehoy-ness’, perhaps best exemplified in Johnny Eames of The Small House at Allington and The Last Chronicle of Barset, or have an even less attractive predilection to vacillation in matters of love. Major Grantly in The Last Chronicle, though with a plain duty to rescue Grace Crawley and marry her out of hand, is ridiculously dependent on his father’s whim for an income. Frank Greystock of The Eustace Diamonds abandons Lucy Morris to her fate as a governess and is flagrantly unfaithful to her with his cousin Lizzie. Even Trollope himself said of the hero of Framley Parsonage, ‘I know it will be said of Lord Lufton… that, putting aside his peerage and broad acres and handsome, sonsy face, he was not worth a girl’s care and love.’

But when he created Frank Gresham he was relatively new to the business of hero-making. He did not And it necessary to ascribe to this young man as a chief fault that ‘he was so young’, as he later did to Peregrine Orme in Orley Farm, or bestow on him as among ‘frolics of which he had been guilty’ the liberating of a bag full of rats into the college hall at dinner time. For this and other like offences young Orme was sent down from his university, but Frank desperately wants to return to Cambridge in October, and this in opposition to the wishes of his mother and aunt who would have him stay at home and sell himself to an heiress.

From the first Frank is not interested in money and not much interested in ‘blood’. What has happened to him is what happens to many young men and must have been even more common in Victorian lives; he falls in love with the first young woman he has ever really known well, his sister’s best friend. In Frank’s case, though, this is very like a biological imprinting, not an easy-come, easy-go first love but a strong, permanent and surely lifelong attachment. In his devotion to Mary Thorne, the doctor’s niece, he never really wavers. True to her and to himself, he gives no more than lip service to his ‘lady-aunt’ when set upon to court the ointment ‘ heiress Miss Dunstable. In a series of curious scenes, interesting because they are so un-Victorian, he and Martha Dunstable play a game he knows is false and she, because of her beleaguered situation as a prey to fortune-hunters, only briefly suspects may be sincere.

Frank found the task before him by no means an easy one. He had to make Miss Dunstable understand that he had never had the slightest idea of marrying her, and that he had made love* to her merely with the object of keeping his hand in for the work as it were; with that object, and the other equally laudable one of interfering with his cousin George…

‘Miss Dunstable, I never for a moment thought of doing what you accuse me of; on my honour, I never did. I have been very foolish – very wrong – idiotic, I believe; but I have never intended that.’

‘Then, Mr Gresham, what did you intend?’

This was rather a difficult question to answer; and Frank was not very quick in attempting it. ‘I know you will not forgive me,’ he said at last; ‘and, indeed, I do not see how you can. I don’t know how it came about; but this is certain, Miss Dunstable; I have never for a moment thought about your fortune; that is, thought about it in the way of coveting it.’

‘You never thought of making me your wife, then?’

‘Never,’ said Frank, looking boldly into her face.

‘You never intended really to propose to go with me to the altar, and then make yourself rich by one great perjury?’

‘Never for a moment,’ said he.

Still less has he thought about any fortune that may be coming the way of Mary Thorne.