ABSTRACT
While Anthony Trollope did not consciously write social history tracts, his novels do reflect his age's preoccupation with what Frederic Harrison calls 'the science of society'. Indeed, so precise is Trollope about the make-up of his fictional communities, it is possible to conduct our own census of them to discover a society broadly similar to that exposed by mid-Victorian censuses. There is no cause for surprise that Trollope's stories contain a concentration of those families most prone to produce problems and his characters, both as marriage partners and as parents, face more difficulties than the world at large, for this census shows us Trollope's specific interest in men as parents. Trollope stalks the marital bed-chamber to expose the catastrophic marriage between an obsessional and jealous husband and an intransigent wife. There are some father and son relationships in the novels where the warm loving feeling which flows freely between two men is regularly expressed in an embrace.
