Orley Farm [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONIf Orley Farm is not now the best known of Trollope's novels, it was in its own day the most respected of them. Looking back from the mid-1870s when writing his Autobiography, Trollope says : 'Most of those among my friends who talk to me now about my novels, and are competent to form an opinion on the subject, say that this is the best I have written.'^ Although in terms of sales it was overshadowed by the more popular Barsetshire novels, it won George Eliot's approval and was praised by the more serious among the reviewers, including G. H. Lewes, the most influential proponent of mid-Victorian realism.^ It is certainly a novel which demands attention when we survey the rich field of nineteenth-century fiction.Trollope began to write Orley Farm in July i860, when he was riding high on the outstanding success of Framley Parsonage, which was serialized in the Cornhill Magazine from January i86o to April 1861. For his new venture he decided to write a much longer novel than Framley Parsonage, indeed a larger novel in all respects, with more plot lines, more central characters, more deeply examined social and intellectual issues, and a wider social and geographical scope; and he chose for it the mode of publication which Dickens had made popular and which Thackeray had used for his biggest novelspart issue in twenty monthly numbers at a shilling a number, with two illustrations to each. Part issue began in March 1861, before Framley Parsonage was quite finished, and the same eminent artist, John Everett Millais, was employed to illustrate it. Presumably author and publisher alike were hoping for sales comparable with those of Framley Parsonage, which had helped the Cornhill1An Autobiography, ed. M. Sadleir (Oxford, 1950; reprinted with an Introduction by P. D. Edwards, World's Classics, 1980), p. 166.2See D. Skilton, Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries (Longman, 1972), pp. 24-8.