It's been a while since I read something for pure pleasure--or more specifically to distract me from other, less pleasant things. For that purpose, I could not have done much better than this book. Posessed of all the charm of Dickens, but with significantly more insight into his characters, Trollope takes aim not at social evils, but at personal ones. Trollope even goes so far as to make light of his generally more regarded contemporary, terming him "Mr. Popular Sentiment", an author guilty oversimplifying the rather complex issues of their day to ones of simple villainy.
Trollope goes to great lengths to avoid this, and makes a point of humanizing all of the characters--even the least sympathetic--in remarkably believable ways. Whereas Dickens' creations behave like caricatures, and are correspondingly amusing, but free of substance, Trollope's are at every moment believable, human, and more to the point, a mixture of vice and virtue. "In this world," as he observes, "no good is analloyed, and that there is but little evil that has not in it the seed of what is goodly" (194).
Which made the book somewhat more troubling to read than a similar one of Dickens' might have. The fact that the most noble of characters--John Bold, here-- brings about disaster through his good intentions, and the most sniveling of men--the eponymous Mr. Harding--is fundamentally noble accurately portrays the state of the world. To take a proud stand against a social evil is rather pigheaded and misguided, as it turns out. The greatest battles of all, and the only ones wirth winning, are those within ourselves, those we fight against our own mixed nature.
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