Partying with the Opposition: Social Politics in The Prime Minister

Abstract

The critical reviews of Anthony Trollope's 1876 novel The Prime Minister resound with a single complaint. Trollope's characters have descended into the netherworld of "vulgarity." The reviewer for the Spectator, for example, sees in Trollope's story "the disposition to attribute to the majority of mankind an inherent vulgarity of thought." 1 Even previously dignified and aristocratic characters, such as Plantagenet Palliser (now the Duke of Omnium), have been dragged through the 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 the vulgar crowd till she is utterly unrecognizable." 2 The charge of vulgarity is not limited to the actions of the characters but applies equally to the aesthetic experience of reading the novel, as the Saturday Review notes: "To whatever part of the story he may turn, the reader of the Prime Minister is unable to escape the all-pervading sense of artistic vulgarity." 3

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.