Obvious generalizations as to class have gone out of style. But Victorian England was a land of class and caste, as shown in this allusion to a hired hand in the mill: "His companion in the mill did not come near them, knowing, as the poor do know on such occasions, there was something going on which would lead them to prefer that he should be absent."
There's also a murder mystery. It occupies several chapters, but at the end it is dismissed with only the limited knowledge of the details told by Carry Brattle and her brother Sam, both witnesses at the trial.
The story of the Mary Magdalene, though innovative, is, after all, sentimental; the love story, perhaps considered essential to sell the book to the public, is tedious; the murder mystery is perfunctory; but I wouldn't miss the story of the Methodist chapel.
A TERMINAL AFFECTION
SIR HARRY HOTSPUR OF HUMBLETHWAITE
The beleaguered father of the twenty-first century might at first look with some longing to the mores of the nineteenth century and to Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, in a time and place when a father's word was law, and a faithful daughter would not marry without her father's consent. It was not so simple, though, and that's what the book is about. The plot anticipates that of Henry James's Washington Square, written about ten years later about a family in New York.
Trollope presents the story in a short novel of 172 pages, which means there are no subplots. However, the reader is not shortchanged by any lack of reflections by and about the characters as each turn of the story unfolds. Whereas James regards his participants in a rather detached fashion, as a puppet master who pulls the strings and watches the unfortunate movements that may result, and with relative economy of words, Trollope regards his characters with as much affection as they deserve, spending paragraphs detailing all aspects of the situation as they may appear to each of them all along the way.
The daughter of a wealthy baronet falls in love with her cousin who is a spendthrift and unworthy of her. We must follow the ground rules of Victorian society—cousins may marry, and a father must decide whether to approve of his daughter's intended husband and is indeed obliged to investigate his character. In this case, we learn that the mortal sin committed by the suitor is that he cheated at cards. Remember T. S. Eliot's line about Macavity the Mystery Cat: "He's outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)"
For our later generation, Trollope is a patient instructor: We are reminded that an Englishman's home is his castle. "Nothing on earth should induce Sir Harry to see his cousin anywhere on his own premises."