On January 1 I started Trollope novel #26, The Vicar of Bullhampton, and I finished it last night.
Its central character is a clergyman named Francis Fenwick, who lives with his wife Janet in a village with a mill. We see a lot of the miller's family, because they're at the heart of one of the three plot strands. One of their sons gets mixed up with some unsavory characters, who are implicated in a murder. This situation arises in the wake of another sorrow: one of their daughters was beguiled by a scoundrel, and she has been cast out. There's so much Victorian vagueness that it's a little hard to tell what's going on with Carry Brattle, honestly. Is she an occasional sex worker? because she didn't have a lot of other options open to her? or is this a more permanent state of affairs? The vicar is trying to figure out how to help the Brattles, and floundering. Carry is perceived as being so degraded that she's beyond help, but the vicar is determined to figure something out.
Another plot strand involves the vicar's closest friend, Harry Gilmore, the squire who owns the mill. Gilmore is hopelessly in love (I'm using that phrase literally) with a character named Mary Lowther, who does not love him in return. Trollope, as is his wont, spends big chunks of the book musing about marriage through these characters. How should we make our decisions about marriage? How much influence should money have? How much should we care about the perspectives of our family and friends? How much does falling in love matter?
The third plot strand involves a conflict between the vicar and the Marquis of Trowbridge, a silly and pompous old man who resolves to believe the worst of the vicar. The Marquis decides to punish the vicar by allowing the local Methodists to build a hideous chapel with a cacophonous bell right outside the vicar's front gate. (In Trollope's day, Methodists were dissenters and outsiders, not the mainline denomination that they are these days.)
I really enjoyed the character of the vicar, who wrestles persuasively with what it means to live a Christian life in a messy world. He keeps asking himself hard questions: what's the role of a clergyman in assisting his flock to live virtuous lives? I also enjoyed Janet and Mary and their relationship.
This is a Barsetshire-adjacent novel, in which we get a brief glimpse of the Dragon of Wantley and hear from a familiar bishop, but it's not part of the chronicles. In addition to the marriage theme, we see some other Trollope touchstones: the human costs of the slow grinding of the legal system, the useful work that a skilled lawyer can do. We have a sprinkling of quirkily named characters (the tailor Cutcote, the publishing house of Bringémout & Neversell), and a uniquely Trollopean mode of condemnation: the dreaded annuity. It seems to me that whenever Trollope writes "..and they settled an annuity upon him," he's pretty much channeling this woman:
Next I think I'll read one of Trollope's Irish novels. Watch this space for more scintillating Trollope content!
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