ABSTRACT
The vexed question of personal legitimacy-of what constitutes a proper marriage and thus legally sanctioned offspring, and what it means, more generally, to be a socially authorized member of a family or community-recurs throughout Anthony Trollope’s work. Many of the novels of the late 1850s and 1860s, for example Doctor Thorne (1858), Castle Richmond (1860), Can You Forgive Her? (1865), The Belton Estate (1866), and He Knew He Was Right (1869), explore the legal, social, and emotional consequences of various forms of actual or alleged illicit liaisons; and the fall-out from unorthodox relationships can be the means of investigating the often contradictory claims of formal law, dynastic imperative, romantic love, and other kinds of emotional entanglements. It is a concern that is extended in John Caldigate, Trollope’s late novel of 1879 that explores the consequences of a possibly bigamous colonial marriage; however in much of the work of the 1870s and early 1880s, particularly Ralph the Heir (1871), Lady Anna (1874), Is He Popenjoy? (1879), and his final completed novel Mr Scarborough’s Family (1883), Trollope seems to be intrigued by the slipperiness of the legal boundary between legitimate and illegitimate birth itself. “‘Nothing is more difficult to decide than questions of legitimacy,’” remarks the solicitor Mr Frick in Lady Anna, recalling a case in which “‘they had to go back a hundred and fifty years and at last decide on the memory of a man whose grandmother had told him she had seen a woman wearing a wedding ring.’”1
