Books with author Anthony TROLLOPE (1815 - 1882)

When Joseph Mason of Groby Park, Yorkshire, died, he left his estate to his family. A codicil to his will, however, left Orley Farm, near London, to his much younger second wife and infant son. The will and the codicil were in her handwriting, and there were three witnesses, one of whom was no longer alive. A bitterly fought court case confirmed the codicil. Twenty years pass. Lady Mason lives at Orley Farm with her adult son, Lucius. Samuel Dockwrath, a tenant, is asked to leave by Lucius, who wants to try new intensive farming methods. Aggrieved, and knowing of the original case, Dockwrath investigates and finds a second deed signed by the same witnesses on the same date, though they can remember signing only one. He travels to Groby Park in Yorkshire, where Joseph Mason the younger lives with his comically parsimonious wife, and persuades Mason to have Lady Mason prosecuted for perjury. The prosecution fails, but Lady Mason later confesses privately that she committed the forgery, and is prompted by conscience to give up the estate.

Presented as the memoir of one Ephraim Mackellar, steward of the Durrisdeer estate in Scotland, the novel opens in 1745, the year of the Jacobite Rising. When Bonnie Prince Charlie raises the banner of the Stuarts, the Durie family—the Laird of Durrisdeer, his older son James Durie (the Master of Ballantrae) and his younger son Henry Durie—decide on a common strategy: one son will join the uprising while the other will join the loyalists. That way, whichever side wins, the family's noble status and estate will be preserved.

Amongst the great popular novelists of the nineteenth century who are still read today, Anthony Trollope stands alongside his contemporary, Charles Dickens. "The Warden" was first published in 1855 and it was Trollope’s fourth novel, but the first in the clerical series which became known as The Barsetshire Chronicles (AKA Barchester series), and it established his reputation as a popular novelist in the Victorian period, becoming Trollope’s first really successful novel. The others in the sequence are "Barchester Towers", "Doctor Thorne", "Framley Parsonage", "The Small House at Allington", and "The Last Chronicle of Barset".The opening of the novel makes it clear that Barchester was supposed to be a cathedral town in the south west of England, and it is probably constructed imaginatively from elements of Salisbury and Wells cathedrals, which Trollope knew well from his travels around the south west in his professional capacity as inspector of the postal system.In the mid nineteenth century there were a number of financial scandals in the Church of England. Trollope based ‘The Warden’ on the St Cross scandal, but in the novel the Warden is a kindly, devoted, priest, beloved by all that knew him and is racked by fear that he is accepting money to which he is not entitled. His antagonist is his prospective son-in-law John Bold and his (somewhat unwelcome) ally is one of Trollope’s strongest characters, the Archdeacon of Barchester, Dr. Theophilus Grantly.Novels in the Barchester series:1-The Warden2-Barchester Towers3-Doctor Thorne4-Framley Parsonage5-The Small House at Allington6-The Last Chronicle of Barset