Portraits of Human Nature: Anthony Trollope at 200
Trollope gives us the cad who is not quite entirely caddish, the woman who works hard to maintain a prudent marriage without forgetting the imprudent one she had herself wanted. Nothing could be less like Dickens’s stark portraits of saints and fiends moving through a black-and-white world in which the roads to perdition and redemption, though possible to miss, are nonetheless clearly marked.