Threats from Above and Below

Abstract

Phineas Finn was first serialized from 1867 to 1869 in Saint Paul’s Magazine, a publication which reflected the male-orientated interests of City professionals and was edited by Anthony Trollope himself.1 It then appeared as a novel in 1869. Phineas Finn is the second in the ‘Palliser’ series which comprises six intertwined, political novels. As some of the themes in Phineas Finn are reflected in the other novels in this series, I will refer to them throughout the course of the following two chapters. Straddling the mid- to late-Victorian era, the series runs over two decades and includes the following works: Can You Forgive Her? (1865), Phineas Finn (1869), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Phineas Redux (1874), The Prime Minister (1876) and, lastly, The Duke’s Children (1880), which was published two years before Trollope’s death. During his lifetime, Trollope did not devise this description for the novels. Between 1893 and 1928 Dodd, Mead and Company published the six novels under the title ‘The Parliamentary Novels’, but it was only in the twentieth century that the Trollopian Michael Sadleir suggested the term ‘Palliser Novels’. This description was based on the fact that characters recur throughout these novels, most notably the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Plantagenet Palliser and his spirited wife, Lady Glencora. Reading the Palliser novels in order, the reader forms a long acquaintance with the Pallisers and Finn, whose lives become entangled with other incidental characters in this vast soap-operatic roman à clef. As Doyle later wrote in his memoirs, Trollope had ‘the whole Victorian civilization dissected and preserved’.2KeywordsWalk AwayContemporary ReviewSaturday ReviewJuly 1866Incidental CharacterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.