ABSTRACT
A self-consciously literary man who was also self-consciously obsessed with money, Anthony Trollope has long earned attention from readers interested in the connections between economics and fiction. Since the mid-1990s especially, critics have decoded Trollope’s obsession with markets, showing not just how his own novels behaved like commodities, but also how the characters in them speculate, invest, and go bust in such interdependent ways that Trollope’s fictional worlds themselves seem to follow economic laws.2 At the same time that “The New Economic Criticism” began this renewed engagement with Trollope’s money matters, work by Kathy Psomiades and Lauren Goodlad, among others, sought to explore Trollope’s varied investments in the legacies of political liberalism, using gender, in Psomiades’s case, as a central category to do so.3 This essay looks to supplement these important discussions of money, liberalism, and gender in Trollope by introducing a fourth term, one not usually taken account of in these arguments: empire.
