Trollope is fast making a bid to become my favorite of the British Victorian novelists. I love the story of how he worked as a civil servant in the post office for twenty years while writing novels on the side. “He trained himself to produce a given number of words an hour in the early morning before going off to his post office duties.” By this means, he eventually wrote and published 47 novels and 16 other books and became well known in the Victorian book world, especially for his series of six novels about clerical life in the made up county of Barsetshire.

I also like the novels themselves. Trollope lands somewhere between Dickens and Thackeray in tone. His novels are less sentimental and heart-rending than those of Dickens. The reader does begin to care about Trollope’s characters, but we see the flaws in each of them as well as the pathos, and we’re never too surprised or struck down when their lives are a jumble of good and bad as a result of poor and not-so-poor decisions and eventualities. I’ve not yet been moved to tears or deep emotion by any of Trollope’s novels.

Trollope’s heroes and heroines are human and flawed, but Trollope is not so cynical and world-weary as Thackeray on the opposite side. (Vanity, but enjoyable vanity.)Trollope’s books have a lot to say about marriage and romantic relationships, both prudent and imprudent, mercenary and idealistic. But his characters are generally multi-dimensional, not completely out to marry for love or for money or for social position, instead maybe for some combination of the three.

Anyway, I read all the Barsetshire Chronicles last year and the year before, and then I decided to continue on with Trollope’s political series of novels, The Palliser Novels. The Barsetshire novels take place mostly outside London among people who are country people even though they may rich and aspiring to be “citified.” The Palliser books are set in and around Parliament, and there is a great deal of talk about British politics and political maneuvering. It’s all very confusing for an American reader, and maybe even for a current day British reader. But I could just read through all of the political mumbo-jumbo and set it aside to get at the meat of the story, a tale in this second Palliser Novel of a young Irishman, Phineas Finn, who is flattered and cajoled into running for office in the British House of Commons and wins a seat therein. Then the rest of the book is about Phineas’s romantic adventures and entanglements with some parliamentary wrangling and angling thrown into the mix.

Phineas Fin is young and innocent and Irish when he comes to London to take his seat in the House of Commons. And by the end of the book three years later, he has become romantically involved with no less four different women, and yet managed to remain rather innocent, even if he is somewhat older and and wiser.

Phineas is a frustrating and endearing character, a “gentleman” working hard to maintain his own integrity and honor while swimming along in a sea of political intrigue and compromise and conflicting rules and societal norms. He becomes an outsider, then an insider, then an outsider again, all in the space of three busy years. And his romantic and monetary fortunes rise and fall just as quickly. He falls in and out of love several times, considers marrying for the sake of money or position, resolves to give up all money and position for the sake of the woman he loves, and finally ends up with the best of the four women he has been courting. But I wasn’t sure that in the end he would remain happy with the marital bargain he made.

It was a good story. One of the things it made me think about, on this day after the inauguration of our 47th president, was the responsibility that we have to pray for our politicians and elected officials. It’s not any easier now than it was in the nineteenth century to maintain one’s integrity and do the work of government in Washington, D.C. or London or even Austin, TX. I thought about praying especially for Vice-President Vance and for other younger men and women who have been elected to office for the first time. It really is something of a swamp up there, and it’s not easy to know when to compromise and when to stand firm and how to stay out of trouble and how to still keep the courage of one’s convictions.

So, Phineas Finn is the second of the Palliser Novels, and the third one is called The Eustace Diamonds, which I believe has nothing to do with Phineas Finn. Then comes a book entitled Phineas Redux, which I assume is all about our man Phineas Finn again. Will he return to Parliament? Will he become some other sort of public servant? Will his marriage work out? Will the other ladies that he didn’t marry reappear in his life? Stay tuned, as they say on TV.