And so John Caldigate was born. It is the story of a young man who amasses more gambling debts than he can pay while a student at Cambridge and subsequently forsakes his inheritance of the family estate and strikes out for Australia. He falls in love with a local girl, Hester Bolton, after only seeing her once before he leaves, but on the ship he has an encounter with "Mrs. Smith," also in the second class section, and they talk about marriage. We then follow John Caldigate to the goldfields, where his experiences are basically those described above. And then we fast forward some four or five years and see him returning home a wealthy man. But what about the woman from the ship—who became known in Australia as Mademoiselle Cettini, singer and dancer? The text is silent.
Armed with maturity and money, John patches up his relationship with his strict father and becomes reinstated as the heir of the family estate in the fens near Cambridge. Despite misgivings by her family, Hester, the young girl of his dreams, agrees to marry him, and the young hero appears to be triumphant in all. But the reader is less than halfway through the book, and it's too early for a happy ending.
And now we begin to learn more about the woman from the ship. After John and Hester are married and have a child, he receives a telegram from his mining partner in Australia, asking for a large sum of money. He then receives a letter from the woman, signed, "Euphemia Caldigate," in which she says she will return their marriage certificate to him if he pays the money to Tom Crinkett, his former partner; and then she will marry Crinkett and make no further claim on him. Otherwise "the law must take its course."
So what did happen in Australia? Caldigate immediately goes to Hester's brother, a lawyer in Cambridge, and shows him the letter. In response to hostile questioning from Robert Bolton, he states that it is all true except that he was never married to her. He concedes that he was "very intimate with her," and that she lived with him as his wife. When a Wesleyan minister called on her to upbraid her, she said that John had promised to marry her, and John did not deny it. When Bolton asks him if she used his name there, he replies, "It was a wild kind of life up there, Robert, and this was apparent in nothing more than in the names people used. I daresay some of the people did call her Mrs. Caldigate. But they knew she was not my wife."
Oh, these Victorians! "It was a wild kind of life up there." How does this play in England? Answer: Not well. Caldigate is believed by his father, his priest, and, most importantly, by his wife. It soon becomes apparent that Hester has developed from a quiet maiden lass sitting in the corner, into an assertive wife and mother, willing to defy her mother, father, and brothers in defense of her husband and herself. And here we meet one of the blackest villains Trollope has given us: Mrs. Bolton, mother of Hester and second wife of her husband. Mrs. Bolton was a zealot of the low church (which provided Trollope with several of his villains), and her daughter's suitor never convinced her by his attendance at Sunday services that he was anything other than a "lost sinner." His father did not attend church, and despite John's efforts to keep up appearances, he did not have a history of perfect attendance at divine services. And there were even rumors of a relationship with a Mademoiselle Cettini in Australia. John made an explanation to Hester, which she accepted. But Mrs. Bolton never gave her blessing to the match, and although her daughter finally persuaded her to attend the wedding, she only did so as a heavily veiled spectator from a back pew.
And then it becomes known that he has been accused of having had a wife in Australia! With the consent of her stepsons and the grudging consent of her husband, Mrs. Bolton lures her daughter to Puritan Grange, the Bolton home. In a great scene of conflict, she makes her a prisoner there. We have come to learn by this time that Hester is endowed with all her mother's determination and stubbornness. When Hester finds the doors locked against her, she seats herself in the hall with her baby in her arms, opposite her mother, seated in another chair. Hester spends the night stretched out on the floor. Although Mr. Bolton pleads with his wife to let her go, she is more concerned with the salvation of her daughter's soul than with such earthly consequences as murder. "Oh, He knows! He knows! And if He knows, what matters what men say that I have done to her." (Mrs. Bolton shares this concern for the welfare of the soul, at the expense of the body, with another of Trollope's zealous villains, Aunt Charlotte in Linda Tressel.)
In the end Hester's half brothers decide that she must be allowed to leave, and after a three-day standoff the gates are unlocked, and she bids goodbye to her parents and leaves.
In this scene Mrs. Bolton had outdone even the wife of Bishop Proudie in the Barsetshire novels. Mrs. Proudie stands as a comic figure in comic novels, but there is little comedy about Mrs. Bolton. Her sin is the same as Mrs. Proudie's—an excess of zeal in the cause of religion—but here there is little to laugh at.
After this climax, the story plays itself out, but it is clear that Hester will not be defeated. John Caldigate is tried and convicted of bigamy. Prior to the trial he even finds himself conscience-bound to pay twenty thousand pounds (he had received from his Australia ventures some sixty thousand pounds) to Tom Clinkett, Mrs. Smith-Cettini, and their two conspirators, who had not been so fortunate as he with their market timing. (Trollope's visit to the gold mines had convinced him that the gold seeking was all a gamble.) At this point this reader lost patience with John Caldigate, and it is said that his editor did, too, but Trollope refused to change the story, saying that it was essential to the plot.
While John Caldigate is languishing in prison, further evidence in the case is uncovered. Ever the postal service man, Trollope gives us a detailed look at how close inspection of postmarks and stamps helps determine whether an important envelope addressed to "Mrs. John Caldigate" in John's hand was stamped before or after it was alleged to have been sent.