ABSTRACT
To move from the radical analysis of Great Expectations to almost any Trollope novel is to become at once aware how much more at ease Trollope is with the idea of the gentleman than either Dickens or Thackeray. Trollope's most thorough, though not perhaps most satisfactory treatment of the subject is in Doctor Thome. The prose of moral description in Trollope is usually cautious and qualified, suggesting the difficulty of analysis and judgement; here the rhythm of rhetorical certainty indicates an uncharacteristic intensity of revulsion. This chapter examines Trollope's myth of the squire in more detail. The purest expression of this myth is Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite (1870), one of Trollope's finest (and shortest) novels. Trollope's 'Saxon' bias meshes naturally with the pastoral values which, as James Kincaid and others have pointed out, inform his presentation of Barsetshire.
