The critical reviews of Anthony Trollope's 1876 novel The Prime Minister resound with a single complaint. Trollope's characters have descended into netherworld of vulgarity. The reviewer for Spectator, for example, sees in Trollope's story the disposition to attribute to majority of mankind an inherent vulgarity of thought.1 Even previously dignified and aristocratic characters, such Plantagenet Palliser (now Duke of Omnium), have been dragged through mud and made to seem like common people. The reviewer, however, saves her most severe censure for Glencora, Palliser 's wife, noting that She descends ... to an impossible degree, and perspires with effort in vulgar crowd till she is utterly unrecognizable.2 The charge of vulgarity is not limited to actions of characters but applies equally to aesthetic experience of reading novel, Saturday Review notes: To whatever part of story he may turn, reader of Prime Minister is unable to escape all-pervading sense of artistic vulgarity.3 Vulgarity, however, is not just an aesthetic problem with novel; it proves to be a problem within novel well. Here reviewers seem to be taking their cues from Palliser, who charges his wife with this very sin. Seeing expensive changes that Glencora has made to their estate, Palliser deems effort vulgar. Glencora, feeling sting of this condemnation, thinks, Vulgarity! There was no other word in language so hard to bear that.4 For Palliser, vulgarity results from assumption that money alone represents class. When he sees his redecorated home, with its useless porticos and its carefully designed archery field, he balks at ostentatious display. In Palliser 's opinion, flag announcing his arrival is proper, dignified demonstration of his class position. Ducal flags cannot be purchased, while assumed and preposterous grandeur of his altered home is as much within reach of some rich swindler or of some prosperous haberdasher himself (1, 175). This, for Palliser, is root of vulgarity: accessibility of aristocratic privileges to people who have no need to regard them a duty.