ABSTRACT
Reviewing two decades of Trollope scholarship, Mark W. Turner remarks that “Trollope’s work is clearly significant to Irish questions,” citing a special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture (2004) and the several essays therein that attend to gender in his Irish novels as representative of a broader critical interest in “the way in which identity is formed in mid-Victorian Britain.”1 In earlier work, I have pursued the relationship between Trollope and Ireland from a point of view that inverts Turner’s formulation, asking how and why “Irish questions” are significant to Trollope’s fiction, hoping to problematize the distinction between English and Irish questions as it is still imagined not only within Trollope studies, but on the broader terrain of postcolonial approaches to nineteenth-century literatures in English.2 Even though numerous critics have explored the hybridity within both English and Irish identities, the status of the author at hand as the quintessential representative of an Englishness untroubled by its heterogeneous relations to “others” still maintains considerable sway. “Irish questions”—even “the Irish Question”—should be fundamental both to how we read Trollope and to how we understand the complex formation of identities at mid-century, identities in which norms of gender, class, race, and ethnicity intersect with one another. In this essay, I argue that Irish questions do matter to Trollope and, moreover, that the question of Phineas Finn’s Irishness-which has mattered as much or more to Trollope’s critics as it ever did to Trollope-provides an especially good site for understanding this.
