ABSTRACT
The Small House at Allington, the penultimate novel of Trollope's rural Barsetshire chronicle, tells a story that seems to be quintessential pastoral in its longing for lost innocence and for things past, and in its search for harmony between man and nature. Both the narrator and the central characters, the rustic-named Lily Dale and her lover, the London clerk Adolphus Crosbie, are marked by nostalgia. The Small House at Allington was written during one of the most profound cultural moments in the Victorian era: the aftermath of Charles Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species. In light of Darwin's radical evolutionary theory and of the predatory natural world it revealed a realm that Tennyson called nature red in tooth and claw the shattered pastoral becomes the only form the genre can authentically take. Trollope's broken pastoral is created through a number of narrative strategies.
