ABSTRACT
The continuities and contrasts in Anthony Trollope’s treatment and use of “illegitimacy” as a personal disability and a legal status can be seen by comparing the central figures in an early novel, Doctor Thorne (1858) and a late work, Mr Scarborough’s Family (1883). In the former, the heroine Mary Thorne, a girl of no wealth and uncertain position, is revealed to the reader in the second chapter to be the child of an illicit liaison between Thomas Thorne’s brother Henry, and Mary Scatcherd, the sister of a local stonemason who has now become a wealthy railway contractor and newly ennobled baronet, and who is also Squire Gresham (Frank’s father’s) creditor. Mr Scarborough’s Family opens with the decision of “old Mr Scarborough,” whose wealth consists of hereditary lands supplemented by industrial profit, to render his profligate elder son, Mountjoy, illegitimate by announcing that he was a prenuptial child (born before his parents’ marriage), so that his wealth might pass to his second son, the priggish Augustus.
