ABSTRACT
From the early nineteenth century onwards, British field sports acted as a political symbol, an instrument of community relations, and a metaphor for public morality. The popularity of field sports underscores the increased access to the countryside in Victorian Britain, but, according to John Lowerson, this alone cannot account for the growing status of hunting in the Victorian era (171). Examining the social relations involved in foxhunting engages with quintessential, and competing, Victorian structures of feeling. At the heart of this contested culture space in midand late-Victorian Britain lie Anthony Trollope’s novels, monographs, and editorials, arenas in which Trollope uses the hunt as a narrative backdrop and as a means of exploring a set of complex but coherent social values. This essay surveys the ethos ascribed to Victorian hunting as Trollope assimilated and transmitted them in his work, and emphasizes the role he, in turn, played in shaping Victorian attitudes toward emergent animal-rights discourses.
