"The most important part of our narrative" is compressed into the last page of the book. Youth is served; but so well has the groundwork been laid in the relatively few pages of this short novel, that the reader closes the book feeling that it has all been a bit more than just a fairy tale.
This was Trollope's last novel to be completed. He was in the middle of writing The Landleaguers when he had a stroke and died. An Old Man's Love was published posthumously in 1884.
RUNNING IN FULL STRIDE AT THE END
THE LANDLEAGUERS
The sense of urgency that ordinarily attends the last few pages of a novel is absent as one approaches the end—but not the conclusion—of The Landleaguers, knowing that the story is to be terminated at the place where Anthony Trollope had the stroke that ended his writing career and, a month later, his life. The reader, instead of racing to the conclusion, tends to linger, watching for any clue as to the impending blow, dreading the moment when the storyteller closes the book for an unexpected interruption, never to return. At least the stroke did not occur during the writing, with the pen dropping from his hand in midsentence. He actually dictated these pages to his son Harry on the morning of November 3, 1882; on that evening he suddenly fell silent while everyone else was laughing at the reading of a comic novel after dinner in the home of his friend John Tilley, and it was apparent that he had had a stroke, leaving him with paralysis of his right side and inability to speak.
Trollope made two trips to Ireland during his last year to familiarize himself with the efforts at land reform and the accompanying violence that he depicted in The Landleaguers; he returned for a second visit after he had already begun writing it. This was the most topical of his novels, and he interviewed several government officials and other knowledgeable Irishmen, but not any of the Landleaguers—those who advocated reform measures that would infringe on the rights of property. Indeed, he interrupted his story of "our three heroines," declaring it necessary to describe the "political circumstances of the day" with an entire chapter. Although Trollope had personal affection for Ireland as the place where he had spent eighteen years and had begun his writing, he was a son of England first and foremost. He had no sympathy for rebellion.
Events on the ground in 1882 marched right through his story, including a reference to the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish on his first day on the job as Chief Secretary for Ireland, and of his Under Secretary T. H. Burke, in May, eleven days before Trollope arrived to begin his research. And in August, five members of a Joyce family were murdered—a tragedy he incorporated into his story.
Ordinarily, an unfinished work is not to be judged, but knowing what we know about Trollope's writing patterns, it seems unlikely that any major revisions would have occurred in what he had already written. We do have forty-eight of the planned sixty chapters, with a short note by Harry Trollope to confirm what any experienced Trollope reader would suspect as to who married whom and who was to be hanged in the end. And as we follow the misfortunes of the Jones family members who occupied Morony Castle, we see the effects of a campaign of terror in a quiet green countryside. Outside agitators, surely from America, have come among the "generous, kindly, impulsive, and docile" country Irish folk, leading them to believe that one man is as good as another (nothing said about the women, of course), and that those who rent land don't really have to pay their full rent to the lord of the manor. Farmers in America don't pay rent to a landlord, they are told. Each man has his own (small) farm. If the lands of America were there to be taken from the Indians, why should not the Irish farmers take it from the greedy landlords?
Mr. Jones's problems at Morony Castle begin when his sluice gates are opened, flooding eighty acres of good bottom land. His ten-year old son Florian, who happened to witness the event, is terrified into silence by his father's discontented renter who makes him swear not to tell, invoking the Catholic religion that the lad had innocently adopted as a bit of filial rebellion. After months of pressure and wheedling by his sisters, who guess correctly that he knows, young Florian finally names Pat Carroll as the culprit. On his way to the courthouse with his father to give testimony, he is shot through the head and killed by a double barrel rifle poked through a hole in a stone wall along the road.