ABSTRACT
For Ireland as a whole the 1840s was a traumatic decade, split in half by the onset of the great famine in 1846. Anthony Trollope pays tribute to the efforts of the Irish gentry in employing men and getting the land back into cultivation. Trollope conveys excellently the Irish small-town atmosphere with its down-at-heel intimacy, its staunch Catholic loyalty and indeed that characteristic casualness which is the source of all the trouble. Likewise, he suggests concisely the generosity of Father Giles, the hostility of the natives from the doctor downwards and the considerable apprehensions of the unfortunate Green. Trollope informs the novel with a finely realised tension between the occasional outbursts of fragile gaiety and the entrapping powers of debt, drink, poverty and fecklessness in Irish life. Trollope's faithfulness in rendering Irish idiom and accent may have been partly responsible for the novel's lack of success.
