I give another on-line talk: On rereading Dr Thorne half a century later

Tom Hollander as Dr Thorne (in the 2016 TV film adaptation, scripted by Jerome Fellowes)

I have a special relationship with this book: it’s the first one by Trollope that I remember reading. I was 18 and it was assigned in a American college novel class. I just loved it and still have my original copy with Elizabeth Bowen’s fine introduction …

Dear friends,

Earlier this week, Monday to be specific, I gave another talk to a group of people who have been part of a now nearly year-long reading and discussion circle of the novels of Anthony Trollope. It is based on a paper I wrote on the concluding 11 chapters of Anthony Trollope’s Dr Thorne. In June 2020 (four months into this pandemic year), I wrote a rather longer paper comparing The Last Chronicle of Barset to Joanna Trollope’s The Rector’s Wife as the same group of people (perhaps different individuals) were beginning a group reading of Trollope’s final Barsetshire book. A video recording of that was put online on the London Trollope Society site (where it still probably is) and I made a brief blog commemorating explaining and offering links to the paper and video, “The Modernity of the Last Chronicle of Barset”.

I write this blog in the same spirit. The paper is slightly different; it is not meant as an argument about Trollope’s novel in its own right (the way the paper on Last Chronicle and The Rector’s Wife was) but rather as the fifth or sixth of a series of talks given by the participants of the group on Dr Thorne or aspects of Dr Thorne as we were reading the novel. It was my task to go over the last eleven chapters of the book as well as present my thesis. I chose to frame my talk by my cherished memories of first reading Dr Thorne at age 18; it was this book that set me on my path (however meandering, and halted for periods) to becoming a Trollope scholar. I have a secondary more impersonal frame, a brief survey of the criticism of this book since its first publication. I don’t have a single thesis or argument but rather make several related claims about some of the central ideas and particular art of this remarkable masterpiece. As before, I’ve put the paper on academia.edu. And as before, the Chairman of the Society, Dominic Edwardes graciously put the video on the Trollope website, and as well as the text itself. He does this so beautifully, especially the video with a photo of me, blurb about me and chosen quote, I urge those who come here regularly to go over and see what I look like and the bit of autobiography that is placed there.

And as before I put the video here on this blog too, to have it on my blog, and if a reader would prefer to read it here.

Here are th most beautiful lines in the book with which I conclude my paper:

He: “But if I were to die, what would you do then?”
She: “And if I were to die, what would you do? People must be bound together.
They must depend on each other”

And here is a photo of another copy of the same ancient venerable student-intended edition of Dr Thorne (Elizabeth Bowen’s introduction is still splendid)

Ellen