The Duke’s Children – Anthony Trollope

The Duke of Omnium, ex-prime minister Plantagenet Palliser, finds himself suddenly a single parent when the Duchess Glencora dies unexpectedly. The role should not be that onerous, the children are adults, just about, albeit somewhat immature.

Eldest son (and heir), known as Lord Silverbridge, was kicked out of his Oxbridge college for some high jinks and has been enjoying life since – hunting, fishing, shooting, and clubbing – and now is into horseracing with its associated gambling. Daddy is not impressed and Silverbridge tries to turn over a new leaf (quit racing), seek a new purpose (a seat in parliament), and find a wife. In his sights for that honour is Lady Mabel Grex, attractive and of good aristocratic stock as approved by the duke. She is impoverished, but that is no bar to the heir of the Omnium fortune. She likes Silverbridge well enough but decides not to roll over at his first advances. She will have some fun, make him work for her hand.

The Palliser daughter, Lady Mary, has no such coquetry. She falls hook, line, and sinker for the poor but honourable gentleman, Frank Tregear. (Unbeknown to her, he is on the rebound from Mabel Grex, the parting being mutually agreed as both need to marry for money rather than love). As for the Duke of Omnium, honourable but poor doesn’t cut it with him. He forbids the marriage. Why can’t she find someone suitable like her brother has!

But when an American beauty, Isabel Boncassen, arrives on the society circuit, Silverbridge’s head is turned, he must have her for his wife. But he knows all too well how his father will react to a proposed marriage to the granddaughter of a New York dock worker. And what about the proposed alliance with the house of Grex?

It takes 500 pages to resolve the thorny issues of love, duty, class, and honour, but we get there in the end. The journey is pleasurable if you are not in any rush and able to enjoy the flowing prose and sly wit of Trollope. And accommodate his off-piste side stories of skulduggery in horseracing, politicking, and wagering.

This, the sixth and final of the Palliser (or political) novels, provides a tick for the Book-et List, completing the series that I began in 2012 with a (second) reading of Can You Forgive Her? Given that I previously read the six volume Barchester Chronicles series between 1997 and 2009, I consider myself well and truly Trollop-ed out for the foreseeable future.