"Territory folks should stick together,/Territory folks should all be pals," is the teaching of the square dancers in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma, but Harry Heathcote has not learned this bit of wisdom when he becomes suspicious that his neighbor Mr. Medlicot might even be involved in starting the fires that threaten his sheep, their pastures, and the fences that enclose the paddocks where they graze. Mr. Medlicot is a free-selector, one who purchases a relatively small piece of land and farms it, in this case raising sugar cane on 200 acres. Harry Heathcote, on the other hand, runs his sheep over a vast area, some 120,000 acres—"almost an English county"—but he doesn't own the land. He rents it from the English Crown, at so much per sheep, and he fears the encroachment on his acreage by the free-selectors.
Arson was a capital offense in Australia at this time, and Harry Heathcote pushes himself to exhaustion in the summer heat, riding out at night to look for mischief. His brusque manners have not won him many friends, and some disgruntled ranch workers are indeed setting fires. In the heat of the struggle he does finally learn that it helps to have a friend or two. Mr. Medlicot provides assistance, incurring a broken collar bone in the ensuing melee, and the alliance of English aristocrats is cemented by the betrothal of Mr. Medlicot to Harry Heathcote's sister-in-law.
The bad guys are sent packing, Harry learns a lesson, and the lovers join hands. "'That's what I call a happy Christmas,' said Harry, as the party finally parted for the night." Zane Grey could hardly have scripted it better.
Trollope appeared to relish his versatility as a story teller, and though he is often identified with the English settings of the Barsetshire and Palliser series, his travels and his novels ranged all over the world. He used his first hand knowledge of Australia to good advantage in Harry Heathcote, his only novel to be set entirely in this English colony. It's a short, well-constructed story, and after working through the introductory chapters, the reader is rewarded with a quickly told romance, a rousing bush fight, and a happy ending, all wrapped up as a Christmas story.
THE WAY THEY LIVED THEN
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
It seemed that there was but one virtue in the world, commercial enterprise—and that Melmotte was its prophet.
Sometimes a fictional character can take on a life of his own during the writing of a story, and even after publication, capturing the imagination of the author and thereafter of the public. Sherlock Holmes, Scrooge and Tiny Tim, Hamlet, and Uncle Tom have all become iconic in our popular culture. [2] I doubt that any of Trollope's characters make any of the "Top 100" lists; that's part of the Trollope problem: he's just not that well known. But if he were, who would make the list? Mrs. Proudie, Obadiah Slope, Lady Glencora, Mr. Crawley, Plantagenet Palliser perhaps—all these are from the Palliser and Barsetshire collections. And from the other novels—the "singletons"—Augustus Melmotte would certainly take his place. In this century he would be assisted by the strong portrayal by David Suchet in the 2003 BBC production, in which he is described as "this huge monster, Melmotte, sitting like a fat spider, drawing all the other characters into his great scheme."