Every time I read another Trollope, I wonder what took me so long to start with him, and why I let so much time go by in between visits to his world.  Doctor Thorne is the third installment in the six-novel Chronicles of Barsetshire series, which just keeps getting better and better.  This is also the first installment to take the reader outside the rarefied world of Barchester clerical leadership and into another part of the county and another echelon of society; although there is one brief shoutout to the Bishop of Barchester, the action lies elsewhere.

The novel opens with an evocative description of the Barsetshire village of Greshamsbury, the manor house of the same name, and the family of squire Gresham.  We learn all about the present squire’s failed stint in Parliament and his financial woes, driven by his avaricious and snobbish wife, Lady Arabella Gresham.  The action really begins with the twenty-first birthday celebration of Frank Gresham the younger, son of the current squire.  It’s a celebration, but a bit of a somber one, because the estate is in dire straits and the townspeople have lost a deal of respect for the squire.  It’s hard to keep a twenty-one-year-old’s spirits down, though, and young Frank is feeling pleasantly flirtatious.  His attentions are focused on his lovely neighbors Patience Oriel and Mary Thorne.

Frank, as the author explains, might be viewed by some as the hero of the story, and he is destined to play the romantic lead:

It is he who is to be our favorite young man, to do the love scenes, to have his trials and his difficulties, and to win through them or not, as the case may be.  I am too old now to be a hard-hearted author, and so it is probable that he may not die of a broken heart.

Trollope has his (misguided) detractors, and one of their frequent complaints is his tendency to insert the authorial voice into the storytelling.  The reader is never permitted to forget that there is an author behind the words.  I can understand the critique, but I personally enjoy Trollope’s little asides.  They feel conspiratorial, as though author and reader are sharing a cuppa and a little joke.

Anyway – back to the young people.  If Frank Gresham is our romantic hero, Mary Thorne is his leading lady.  Mary is the niece of one of the village doctors.  Her birth is something of a matter of mystery – her father was Doctor Thorne’s ne’er-do-well brother, and her mother, well, Mary doesn’t actually know.  The result of this mystery is that, even though Mary is loved and well-cared-for by her uncle, she is essentially without name or fortune.  She’s been brought up as a gentlewoman, but without the expectations of ever being able to marry a gentleman.  Mary is conscious of the precariousness of her own position, and is at pains to discourage young Frank in his attentions – as she believes, like everyone else, that a union with the squire’s son would be impossible.  There are two insurmountable obstacles to such a match: Mary’s utter lack of social position, and her utter lack of funds.

Because Frank – as his mother and her aristocratic relations keep reminding him – has a duty to the estate: “Frank must marry money.”  It’s the only way to solve the financial problems that have beset the estate in recent years.  Frank’s father inherited a robust property, but has run through the family fortune in less than one generation – financing repeated unsuccessful runs for Parliament and other demands of his wife.  Lady Arabella is at the root of all the Greshams’ problems, but naturally she doesn’t see it that way.

Frank has a stubborn streak, and the more he is told (by everyone in the book, Mary included) that he can’t have Mary, the more he is determined that she is the only one for him.  Lady Arabella and her relations conspire to drag him off to Courcy Castle, the family seat of Frank’s mother’s family, and throw him in the way of Martha Dunstable, a fabulously wealthy heiress nine years his senior.  Frank resists the entire time, but he is no match for his Aunt de Courcy – and a good thing, too, because Miss Dunstable is one of the best characters I’ve encountered so far in all of English literature.  Witty, a little acerbic, discerning enough to know when she’s being pursued for her money, Miss Dunstable spends most of her visit to Courcy Castle in rejecting suitors – gently or harshly, as the situation requires.  She sees immediately that Frank is being goaded into a proposal, and she also perceives that he’s no more interested in marrying her than she is in him – which she confirms after he finally proposes and immediately confesses that he’s in love with his pretty neighbor.  And with that, Miss Dunstable becomes Frank and Mary’s biggest cheerleader and, often, Frank’s only source of support in pursuing the match.

Unbeknownst to the young lovebirds, wheels are turning that could change everything.  Doctor Thorne’s richest patient, Sir Roger Scatcherd, is dying.  Sir Roger was once a humble tradesman, but his brilliance in engineering and business made him a fortune and saw his elevation to baronet – a hereditary title – but also contributed to his untimely demise from alcoholism.  Sir Roger calls Doctor Thorne to his bedside and divulges that he wishes to leave his fortune to his alcoholic son, Louis, but if Louis should die before attaining the age of 25, the fortune should pass to the eldest child of Sir Roger’s sister, Mary.  What Doctor Thorne knows, but Sir Roger does not, is that Mary Scatcherd’s eldest child is – Mary Thorne.  And this sets up the novel’s central ethical problem: Doctor Thorne is committed, by virtue of the norms of his profession and a promise to Sir Roger, to keeping Louis alive and healthy so he can inherit, but he knows that if Louis dies, Mary will inherit the fortune and could – if Lady Arabella doesn’t ruin everything – finally have a clear path to happiness with Frank.

I won’t tell you how it all plays out, but it’s Trollope – so you can probably guess.  He’s as committed to happy endings as his predecessor Jane Austen.  What I really want to talk about is how funny this book is.  Trollope’s excellent sense of humor might be one of the best and least known characteristics of his writing.  A series of 600+ page novels about Victorian clergy doesn’t sound like it would be a laugh-fest, but Trollope’s fans are well-supplied with jokes all the same.  There was one scene that made me laugh out loud just as Nugget was reaching the punch line of one of his toddler jokes, and he was delighted with his humor’s reception – until he realized that it was the book Mommy was laughing at, not him.  It’s a scene early on in the book, in which Frank has solicited the advice of his cousin, the Honorable George, on speech-giving.  The Honorable George advises Fred to fix his gaze on a bottle, but there are so many bottles on the table that Frank gets overwhelmed:

Up he got, however, and commenced his speech.  As he could not follow his preceptor’s advice as touching the bottle, he adopted his own crude plan of ‘making a mark of some old covey’s head,’ and therefore looked dead at the doctor.

‘Upon my word, I am very much obliged to you, gentlemen and ladies, ladies and gentlemen I should say, for drinking my health, and doing me so much honour, and all that sort of thing.  Upon my word I am.  Especially to Mr Baker.  I don’t mean you, Harry, you’re not Mr Baker.’

‘As much as you’re Mr Gresham, Master Frank.’

‘But I am not Mr Gresham, and I don’t mean to be for many a long year if I can help it; not at any rate till we have had another coming of age here.’

‘Bravo, Frank, and whose will that be?’

‘That will be my son, and a very fine lad he will be; and I hope he’ll make a better speech than his father.  Mr Baker said I was every inch a Gresham.  Well, I hope I am.’  Here the countess [de Courcy] began to look cold and angry.  ‘I hope the day will never come when my father won’t own me for one.’

‘There’s no fear, no fear,’ said the doctor, who was almost put out of countenance by the orator’s intense gaze.  The countess looked colder and more angry, and muttered something to herself about a bear-garden.

The image of Frank blundering through his speech with his gaze fixed intensely on poor Doctor Thorne, while the countess grumbles in the background, slayed me.  And it’s the beginning of many laugh-out-loud moments to come: Lady Scatcherd (another wonderful character) hiding in the pantry and squabbling with her housekeeper about who has to go upstairs to receive an unwanted guest; the sometimes scathingly witty marriage rejections doled out by the fabulous Miss Dunstable; and Sir Roger’s roaring “put him under the pump!” when visited by the odious Doctor Fillgrave – hilarious.

But between the funny moments, Doctor Thorne is a sweet story of a boy growing into a man, with a man’s constant love for the friend of his childhood; of a doctor struggling between his ethics and his desire to see his niece happy; of a father grieving the burdens his mismanagement has placed on his son; of an epic battle between an aristocratic snob and a young woman whose mild demeanor hides her spine of steel; of the pulls between money, social position, and love.  In short – it’s vintage Trollope.

Doctor Thorne, by Anthony Trollope, available here (not an affiliate link).