A feckless bank clerk woos a farmer’s daughter and is wooed by a local aristocrat in need of funds.
Thomas Adolphus Trollope (1810-1892) was Frances Milton Trollope’s first son and Anthony Trollope's older brother. The plot of this novel heats up after a slow beginning; its bad characters are memorable studies in self-deception, led as they are by banal, routine desires into extravagantly evil behavior.
The characters are “natural but by virtue of their mediocrity. . . . Virtue is mediocre in [Trollope's] hands, and the contrast between it and vice is marked only by the degree in which the latter falls below the mean”; still the novel is “well written, and superior to the common run of novels in originality and interest.” Athenaeum, July 29, 1871
“A well constructed, interesting story”; “one of the chief charms . . . is the humorous portraiture with which it abounds.” Graphic, August 5, 1871
“In spite of many scenes of considerable humour and not a little pathos,” the “coarse vice” portrayed in the novel “left in our mind . . . a most unpleasant recollection.” Saturday Review, August 26, 1871
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