ABSTRACT
The power of public opinion, and especially as it represents the sense of a small community, is one of the novel's greatest strengths. The Saturday Review, in a strangely partial review of the novel, attacked Anthony Trollope's hostility to an aristocracy. The interest of a love-story in Trollope is often greatest, not in the relationship between the lovers themselves or even in the difficulties they have to encounter, but in the way in which others react to it and attempt to interfere with it. Trollope's sure touch conveys the feeling of intermingled interests and curiosity at every level from the squire Butler Cornbury to the brewery foreman Worts. Trollope firmly establishes the Australian atmosphere - indeed perhaps too deliberately almost to the point of parody in some of the opening speeches with their references to 'nobbles', 'pannikins', 'dampers' and the like. Trollope may indeed have been struggling with reason and prejudice himself.
