ABSTRACT
In this essay I argue that The Eustace Diamonds is an exception to Trollope’s reticence on India. Yet, in making this case I do not suggest that Trollope wrote his third Palliser novel explicitly to weigh in on Indian policies or the emerging New Imperialism. Trollope’s fictional meditation on India almost certainly sprang from a consciously literary response to a contemporary novel-Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868).10 Nonetheless, both works clearly attended contemporaneous debates over the governance of India, including the status of India’s “princes,” which have received surprisingly little critical attention. In this way, The Eustace Diamonds offers an illuminating window into the governmentality of a so-called liberal imperialism in the years between the Indian rebellion of 1857-58 and the Royal Titles Act of 1876-a period that included passage of the Second Reform Bill.11 In so doing, Trollope’s third Palliser novel offers a compelling example of a mid-Victorian “geopolitical aesthetic.” By capturing a politico-imperial turning point at a moment when representative government was the object of intense metropolitan scrutiny, the novel visibly struggles to “figure out” the “landscapes and forces” of a global situation not yet fully accessible to individual experience.12
