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39 2 An Old Style Doctor An Introduction to Selections from Anthony Trollope’s Dr. Thorne Anthony Trollope (1815–1892) was a prolific writer who published over forty novels and many short stories. His output is the more remarkable in light of the fact that he also had a distinguished full-time career in the British postal service where his achievements include the organization of mail in Ireland and to Egypt. As a novelist he enjoyed considerable acclaim during his lifetime, and there has recently been a major revival of interest with the re-issue of all his novels in paperback. Dr. Thorne (1858) is a relatively early work, the second in the series known as the “Barsetshire” novels because they all take place in this particular county not too far from London. The first and most famous of the sequence, Barchester Towers (1857) deals with the political jostling for rank and power among the clergymen at the town’s cathedral. The Barsetshire cycle, comprising five novels published in the decade between 1857 and 1867, together with the equally popular six works in the later “Palliser” group that appeared between 1864 and 1880, are at the core of Trollope’s fame. He is preeminent for his portrayal of the professional and landed classes in mid–Victorian England through his finely tuned sensitivity to the nuances of the complex class structure. This aspect is prominent in Dr. Thorne where class tensions are an important factor in the plot as well as in the transactions between the doctor and his patients. Although Dr. Thorne is described in the opening sentence of this long novel as its “chief personage” (5) and later as “our 40 An Old Style Doctor hero” (20), the plot centers on the love between his niece, Mary, and Frank Gresham, the heir to the Greshambury estate. As the Greshams have fallen into debt, Frank is expected to marry a wealthy young woman so as to redeem the family’s fortunes. Mary has no money, at least not until a sudden inheritance late in the novel that leads to its happy resolution . A further objection to Mary on the Greshams’ part is her lack of an adequately lofty social status. The illegitimate daughter of Dr. Thorne’s profligate brother, who was killed in a duel, she has been brought up by her uncle. She is gentle, kind, well educated, and good-looking, but her social level and her impecuniousness make her an unsuitable match for Frank in his parents’ eyes. The dubiousness of Mary’s social status reflects also Dr. Thorne’s own equivocal position in the class hierarchy. He is “a graduated physician ”; this means that he had been educated at Oxford or Cambridge, and belongs to the uppermost tier of the mid–nineteenth-century British medical system. But even at that level his social standing is not high. He has the advantage of being related to a venerable old family in the area: “He was a second cousin to Mr. Thorne of Ullathorne, a Barsetshire squire living in the neighbourhood of Barchester, and who boasted that his estate had remained in his family, descending from Thorne to Thorne, longer than had been the case with any other estate or any other family in the county” (20–21). “But,” Trollope immediately points out, “Dr. Thorne was only a second cousin; and, therefore, though he was entitled to talk of the blood as belonging to some extent to himself, he had no right to lay claim to any position in the county other than such as he might win for himself.” In other words, he derives some social prestige from being distantly connected to the oldest family, but so distantly as not to enable him to command respect automatically by virtue of his “station” in the class hierarchy. For a doctor, family “connections,” as they were called, were considered extremely important at a time when medical men were assessed by their manners, bearing, and appearance rather than by their actual professional expertise, which could be very hard for patients to judge, especially before the legal regulation of medicine and the institution of proper training. So Dr. Thorne is in the awkward position of being regarded by his landed patients as their social inferior. Yet they need his advice, they have on the whole a favorable opinion of his judgment and a certain grudging respect, even affection for him. In the first selection, Dr. Thorne has aggravated the...

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