ABSTRACT
Trollope became ‘the most perfect exponent’ of the British experience by studying Fitzjames Stephen’s ‘serious business in life’, and that succession of political novels to which he contributed-from Can You Forgive Her? in 1863 to The Duke’s Children, and Disraeli’s Endymion, in 1880-were, as George Watson writes, ‘conscious of being something momentous’.5 After 1865, with Thackeray and Mrs Gaskell dead, and Dickens forsaking writing for his dramatic readings, it imposed its categories even on fiction written on a different, domestic or parochial, scale.
