ABSTRACT
In recent years Anthony Trollope's reputation has received a boost from the rediscovery of The Way We Live Now which has been read as some more or less left-wing indictment of Victorian society. Trollope wrote in the last fine Indian summer of the landed gentry's ascendancy. The superior forces of industrial and commercial wealth and a widening franchise were at their destructive work. The first work to be considered, though written in 1855, that is, at the beginning of Trollope's career as a successful novelist, has only recently seen the light. The New Zealander is not a novel, but a panoramic survey of England some two decades before The Way We Live Now. In the several chapters of The New Zealander Trollope covers the press, the law, the Army and Navy, the Church, Parliament and the Crown, society and the arts. Many of his criticisms are familiar from the novels.
