The Pallisers [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Unlike his Barchester novels, which grew into a series by chance, Anthony Trollope's Palliser stories were intended from the start to follow the destinies of Plantagenet Palliser, politician and heir to the great Duke of Omnium, and his beautiful, extrovert young wife, Lady Glencora. This is not to say that Trollope had the whole sequence planned; but he was aware, when he presented his readers in 1863 with Can You Forgive Her?, that he was beginning a multi-volumed reflection of 'the faults and frailties and vices,—as also the virtues, the graces, and the strength of our highest classes'. In fact, the stories are by no means merely about the Pallisers themselves, who frequently retire from the scene for very long periods while the conflicts of other characters are being worked out. Yet, one is ever conscious of their background presence—of Tlanty Pall's' continuing labour at his duties and of Glencora's influence as the very leader of London society. This is as Trollope intended. He believed that characters in a story should be permitted to live as their real-life counterparts would, not in a perpetual state of involvement in critical situations, but for most of their time as lookers-on and limited participants in the affairs of others. It was also his dictum that fictional beings should be seen to age naturally, and to undergo the character-changes which the processes of ageing, maturing, succeeding and suffering should be expected to produce. He achieved this to a large extent by removing people from sight from time to time, so that, as in real life, one sees the changes in them more readily when they return. To help attain this effect he spread the writing of the Palli-