Castle Richmond

Castle Richmond

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Title: Castle Richmond
Author: Anthony Trollope
Release Date: June, 2004 [EBook #5897] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on September 18,
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RICHMOND ***

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CASTLE RICHMOND
BY
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALGAR THOROLD
LONDON & NEW YORK: MCMVI

INTRODUCTION

"Castle Richmond" was written in 1861, long after Trollope had left
Ireland. The characterization is weak, and the plot, although the author
himself thought well of it, mechanical.
The value of the story is rather documentary than literary. It contains
several graphic scenes descriptive of the great Irish famine. Trollope
observed carefully, and on the whole impartially, though his powers of
discrimination were not quite fine enough to make him an ideal
annalist.
Still, such as they were, he has used them here with no inconsiderable
effect. His desire to be fair has led him to lay stress in an inverse ratio
to his prepossessions, and his Priest is a better man than his parson.
The best, indeed the only piece of real characterization in the book is
the delineation of Abe Mollett. This unscrupulous blackmailer is put
before us with real art, with something of the loving preoccupation of
the hunter for his quarry. Trollope loved a rogue, and in his long
portrait gallery there are several really charming ones. He did not,
indeed, perceive the aesthetic value of sin--he did not perceive the
esthetic value of anything,--and his analysis of human nature was not

profound enough to reach the conception of sin, crime being to him the
nadir of downward possibility--but he had a professional, a sort of half
Scotland Yard, half master of hounds interest in a criminal. "See," he
would muse, "how cunningly the creature works, now back to his earth,
anon stealing an unsuspected run across country, the clever rascal"; and
his ethical disapproval ever, as usual, with English critics of life, in the
foreground, clearly enhanced a primitive predatory instinct not
obscurely akin, a cynic might say, to those dark impulses he holds up to
our reprobation. This self-realization in his fiction is one of Trollope's
principal charms. Never was there a more subjective writer. Unlike
Flaubert, who laid down the canon that the author should exist in his
work as God in creation, to be, here or there, dimly divined but never
recognized, though everywhere latent, Trollope was never weary of
writing himself large in every man, woman, or child he described.
The illusion of objectivity which he so successfully achieves is due to
the fact that his mind was so perfectly contented with its hereditary and
circumstantial conditions, was itself so perfectly the mental equivalent
of those conditions. Thus the perfection of his egotism, tight as a drum,
saved him. Had it been a little less complete, he would have faltered
and bungled; as it was, he had the naive certainty of a child, to whose
innocent apprehension the world and self are one, and who therefore I
cannot err.
ALGAR THOROLD.

CONTENTS

I. The Barony of Desmond
II. Owen Fitzgerald
III. Clara Desmond
IV. The Countess
V. The Fitzgeralds of Castle Richmond
VI. The Kanturk Hotel, South Main Street, Cork
VII. The Famine Year
VIII. Gortnaclough and Berryhill
IX. Family Councils
X. The Rector of Drumbarrow and his Wife
XI. Second Love

XII. Doubts
XIII. Mr. Mollett returns to South Main Street
XIV. The Rejected Suitor
XV. Diplomacy
XVI. The Path beneath the Elms
XVII. Father Barney
XVIII. The Relief Committee
XIX. The Friend of the Family
XX. Two Witnesses
XXI. Fair Arguments
XXII. The Telling of the Tale
XXIII. Before Breakfast at Hap House
XXIV. After