ABSTRACT
The mid-nineteenth century and onwards was a critical time for Liberalism, despite the fact that in one guise or another it was in government for most of the period. The vividness of Trollope's political world is found in two settings - his elections and what he call the social world of politics, in London clubs like the Reform and in the great Whig country houses during the Indian summer of their ascendancy. In the Autobiography Trollope says of the Phineas novels that 'they are, in fact, but one novel'. Trollope was describing a condition of political flux, an old world dying and a new one struggling into what promised to be a violent infancy. In the Laura-Kennedy story Trollope brings out, in his characteristic minor key, the human tragedy that, though life is what people make it, the creation does not always match people's intention, and that even noble sacrifice may turn out to be both mistaken and unbearable.
