![]() ![]() ![]() This was the reader’s report on Barchester Towers, the second in Trollope’s Barchester series, and it resulted in a flurry of nerves at the publishers Longmans, who at one point demanded that the author cut the manuscript by a third! It is an odd reaction, given the enduring popularity of Trollope’s six novels, and this volume in particular. ![]() On the contrary, there is a fatal facility in the execution that makes you fancy that the author is playing with his reader, showing how easy it is for him to write a novel in three volumes … It would be quite impossible to compress the three volumes into one without much detriment to the whole. Such a bishop and his wife as Dr and Mrs Proudie have certainly not appeared in our time … But in noticing these defects I am far from saying that it is uninteresting. There is hardly a ‘lady’ or ‘gentlemen’ among them. Inferior to The Warden, Barchester Towers has no plot… The grand defect of the work, I think, as a work of art, is the low-mindedness and vulgarity of the chief actors. ![]()
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