Three brides for three friends: perhaps this wasn't so unusual in Victorian times when meetings, much less friendships, among eligible young people weren't always so easy to obtain. But then the results: the first two couplings are plausible enough, but Katie, the youngest, becomes chronically ill with unrequited love, and although the reader is reassured that the doctors who listen to her chest through wooden tubes find no evidence of consumption, the anxious reader fears that the author will let her die. Trollope became known as a skeptic of Shakespeare's dictum: "Men will die and worms will eat them, but not of love."
We are reminded how Australia was populated as Alaric takes his family there for a fresh start after serving six months in jail for betraying the trust of a young woman for whom he was named trustee. And we see how Victorians did their insider trading, as Alaric is persuaded by the villain of the story, Undy Scott, to buy shares in mines that he is evaluating for the Department of Weights and Measures.
And Trollope indulges in certain liberties. He satirizes the publishing world with Charley Tudor's writing serial novels, and here we find Mrs. Woodward reading Crinoline and Macassar aloud to the young people: "The lovely Crinoline was sitting alone at a lattice window on a summer morning, and as she sat she sang with melancholy cadence the first part of the now celebrated song which had then lately appeared. …"
Thirteen pages of Chapter XXVIII are devoted entirely to an impassioned defense of the Civil Service, particularly of the young men who work there. This chapter is absent from my small leather-bound edition published in 1878 but is restored in the Trollope Society edition of 1992, which follows the text of the first edition, published in 1858. The chapter is irrelevant to the story; it does, however, reveal where the author is coming from. He is coming from the Civil Service, which was his ticket to self-respect and financial independence.
Finally, the first three pages of Chapter XLV, "The Criminal Population is Disposed of," are given to a comparison of this novel's villain, Undecimus Scott, with Bill Sikes. Was Charles Dickens flattered that his villain of Oliver Twist was so honored by his colleague Anthony Trollope, who apologized in the text that he could not give Undy Scott so "decent an end" as that given to Bill Sikes?
It must be added that Trollope considered The Three Clerks to be his best work yet, better than The Warden and Barchester Towers. Contemporary critics agreed with him, including Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. What were they thinking? Perhaps Trollope overestimated his portrayal of Charley Tudor, who may well have been a self-portrait of the hobbledehoy who aspired to write novels but found female companionship in a social class beneath his own—indeed, having to withstand an attack in his office by the mother of a young woman who considered herself to be ill used.
Today's reader may well wonder why The Three Clerks was ever rated higher than The Warden and Barchester Towers. Posterity has certainly not concurred. In the case of Trollope's novels, religion, like politics, has trumped bureaucracy.
The book, however, primarily tells the story of six young people. I must confess that I found myself tiring of them before the author did.