But Beatrice and Caleb are a characteristic Trollopian ‘good’ couple. They do everything with quiet simplicity, for ‘Mr Oriel became engaged demurely, nay, almost silently.’ The lovers’ meetings have hitherto been no more than ‘saying a few words to Beatrice’ during what sound like parochial visits to Greshamsbury. Though unstated, it is implicit that passion is lacking – and their relationship is all the better for that. We understand that Beatrice’s future life will not be typical of a poor parson’s household, for Mr Oriel has unspecified private means, but we are left with little doubt that it will be quiet, self-denying and dutiful – in other words, what in Trollope’s eyes constitutes ideal marriage.

His older couples have not attained it. Fate and chance play little part in Trollope’s fiction. People design their own futures, laying the foundations early in life by self-indulgence, excesses of all kinds, by impetuosity and violent acts or, conversely, by prudence, moderation and selflessness. The Oriel marriage is an example of how it should be done. Trollope believed it his duty to teach morality, particularly to his young women readers, and doubdess he introduced the Beatrice—Oriel scenes with this aim partly in mind. Today we see them rather as lessons held up too late to the Earl and Countess, the ill-assorted Greshams and Sir Roger and Lady Scatcherd, whose marriage has become, tiirough drink and brutality, a relationship of master and slave.

Reading Trollope constantly reminds us, perhaps more than the work of any mid-nineteenth-century novelist, of the then indissolubility of matrimony. A hundred years later it is unlikely that any of these marriages would have lasted more than a few years, the Greshams’ perhaps no longer than the months it would have taken Frank senior to tire of the dubious beauty and undisputed snob-bism of Lady Arabella. Only poor Lady Scatcherd retains love for a spouse, and indeed keeps it to the very bitter end. Her devotion is a precursor of the more refined and elevated devotion Mrs Crawley shows to her persecuted husband three books later. ‘“Oh, my man – my own, own man!” exclaimed the widow, remembering in the paroxysm of her grief nothing but the loves of their early days; “the best, the brightest, the cleverest of them all!”’ Wealth misused and misunderstood has helped put a distance between them, for Lady Scatcherd, in her husband’s words, ‘would have been better for a poor man than a rich one’ and is bewildered by the virtually unlimited money that has come her way.

It is hard to find a Trollope novel in which money, the seeking it, the keeping it, the lack of it, or some other involvement with it, does not play a significant part. In Doctor Thorne it is integral to the plot. This is Victorian rural England. The father has dissipated his wealth and mortgaged his estate; the son must redeem it. Love is recognized as a long way down the scale of motives for marriage, the acquisition of money as unashamedly high up that scale. In our society we shy away somewhat from frank and open talk about money, but Trollope’s true-to-life contemporaneous characters had no such inhibitions. Everyone, the young woman herself included, takes it for granted that no suitor will approach Miss Dunstable for any reason other than her fortune. There is a blatant disregard of whatever personality, wit, looks, charm and accomplishments she may possess. As to compatibility of temperament with a putative husband, Trollope in all his fiction scarcely approaches this criterion of matrimonial choice. We are never told what interests, if any, Mary and Frank have in common, or what tastes, apart from that for tranquillity, Beatrice and Caleb share.

It is physical appearance that attracts his young men and women to each other – that and comparable age. Class is important too, but to be readily dismissed if the money is there. Mr Moffat’s father was a tailor but this does not prevent Squire Gresham from giving his consent to the match, and we suspect that Louis Scatcherd’s father’s having been a stonemason militates against his eligibility far less than his vulgar manners and dissolute life. In both cases the money is there. Money is to make all things smooth in Doctor Thorne. But it would be a mistake to see Trollope as in any way approving this Mammon worship or rushing merrily towards an unmitigated happy ending, so facilely ensured.

From another point of view, as A. O. J. Cockshut points out, the ending is a gloomy one.4 The de Courcys and Lady Arabella have their philosophy of life vindicated by Frank’s marriage, for Mary is base-born and Mary is rich.