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A review by tome15
Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope
5.0
Trollope, Anthony. Doctor Thorne. 1858. Chronicles of Barsetshire No.3. Project Gutenberg.
I have a friend who always has a Charles Dickens novel on her bedside and has read all of them in order several times. Only two other nineteenth-century English novelists are likely to inspire such devoted rereading: Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope. And if you decide to go through Trollope, you won’t be done for a while, because you will have 47 novels, few of them shorter than five hundred pages, in your list. The reason these three authors can be read this way is that their work is remarkably consistent. You can depend on them to give you the kind of insight and entertainment you expect. From Trollope you get a quite transparent style, a comforting and witty acknowledgement in an authorial aside that he is not planning to pull the rug out from under you at all. In the first chapter of Doctor Thorne, Trollope reassures us that this is just a novel and that some description is necessary before the story can start, then apologizing for the digression, which he knows his readers regard as part of his charm. Unlike many novelists of the period he does not write heavily plotted stories bur rather depends on your interest in character and situation to keep you reading. Here the situation involves a kindly, ethical doctor who has to keep a secret from his adopted daughter and provide useless but thorough care for a couple of drunken patients who hold the key to her future in their hands. None of his characters is purely virtuous or purely evil, and he is quite willing along the way to satirize the hypocrisy in English class structure without ever renouncing it entirely. I doubt I will get through all 47 novels, but I do plan to hit some of the better stories, of which this is one.
I have a friend who always has a Charles Dickens novel on her bedside and has read all of them in order several times. Only two other nineteenth-century English novelists are likely to inspire such devoted rereading: Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope. And if you decide to go through Trollope, you won’t be done for a while, because you will have 47 novels, few of them shorter than five hundred pages, in your list. The reason these three authors can be read this way is that their work is remarkably consistent. You can depend on them to give you the kind of insight and entertainment you expect. From Trollope you get a quite transparent style, a comforting and witty acknowledgement in an authorial aside that he is not planning to pull the rug out from under you at all. In the first chapter of Doctor Thorne, Trollope reassures us that this is just a novel and that some description is necessary before the story can start, then apologizing for the digression, which he knows his readers regard as part of his charm. Unlike many novelists of the period he does not write heavily plotted stories bur rather depends on your interest in character and situation to keep you reading. Here the situation involves a kindly, ethical doctor who has to keep a secret from his adopted daughter and provide useless but thorough care for a couple of drunken patients who hold the key to her future in their hands. None of his characters is purely virtuous or purely evil, and he is quite willing along the way to satirize the hypocrisy in English class structure without ever renouncing it entirely. I doubt I will get through all 47 novels, but I do plan to hit some of the better stories, of which this is one.