Doctor Thorne (Oxford World's Classics) (original 1858; edition 2014)

Anthony Trollope's third installment in the Barchester Chronicles. A book of birth, wealth, titles, and class distinctions. Trollope skewers all three while making Dr. Thorne and his bastard strong willed niece Mary, and Mrs Dunstable, the only ones to see the absurdity of these Victorian British mores and attempt to rise above them. Even they ultimately succumb to the pressures of peer and society and fall in line.

All the difficulties are ultimately resolved by an unlikely chain of events and fortuitous deaths typical of this sort of thing and the happy ending is telescoped way before it ever occurs. This leaves the message somewhat diluted.

As always Trollope's prose is marvelous and his sense of humor exquisite making this a fairly light hearted read that belies his later works. The characters are well drawn and tend to be less two-dimensional than Dickens while the plots are nowhere near as lively.

I like this book a lot, maybe better, than I did the previous two volumes Barchester Towers and The Warden and look forward to the next. I'm sure this will seem dull to those that do not favor long 19th century novels, but I always loved this sort of thing.

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4.5 ( )

This is a good love story as well as good literature. ( )

I think I actually enjoyed this one more than Barchester Towers. You knew exactly where it was going but it was quite fun getting there. I did get a little bored towards the end and wanted it to conclude. And the whole let's tell Frank first instead of Mary herself that she is rich did make me want to throw things. But it was enjoyable. ( )

This is very much in the Trollope style with his sense of humour and ability to take the reader into his confidence. The characters are well described and there is a satisfying though rather too neat conclusion.

So it's an enjoyable read but I do find there are drawbacks to Trollope as well that are more obvious here than in the previous two Barsetshire chronicles which are more to do with clerical scheming in Barchester.

The main problem is that he paints the Tories as a noble landowning class whose serfs are all too willing to touch their forelocks to their betters and it's not a problem (in fact a boon) that the Tories oppose expanding the voting franchise and (say) allowing Jews into parliament. The more progressive Whigs are portrayed as haughty snobs yet history shows they were more concerned with the welfare of the poor than the Tories.

Mary and Doctor Thorne are two endearing and admirable characters - neither of them are perfect but you do root for them. ( )