Lizzie is a liar, no three ways about it, confabulating like a good‘un from morning till night and coming to see in the end there might be some truth in her story. Money, rank, and beauty give her licence to paint a poetry over the prose of this world. She is a widow whose sickly husband died within a short time and being a baronet left her a lady with a £4000 pa. income for her life and a son who is the heir to the title. Lady Eustace had a diamond necklace valued at £10000 put on her neck by her husband and she intends to make her own of it and not let it sink back into the estate as her bete noir the family solicitor Camperdown insists. It is an heirloom and therefore cannot be taken as personal property. Was it in London that she first received it or in Scotland at the home castle of Portray? If at home then it might be counted amongst the paraphernalia of the home and therefore property of her own. The law is uncertain on these fine points. Best let it be in Scotland. Yes it was in Scotland.
Lively as a goat amongst the crags she leaps from fable to fib to buttress her stratagems getting increasingly confused as stern truth advances towards her. I read the Palliser series out of turn so I have foreknowledge of certain events and as I read I wondered how was this wrought. Simple when you know Lady Eustace and her mutability and invention all centred around the pole star of her own aims. Is it wrong to attempt to draw her first cousin Frank away from his true love Lucy. Not at all, in her computation it would suit them both,with her money his career as an M.P. and rising barrister would be enhanced. At that time MPs were not paid a salary and besides Frank Greystock is not a very good manager of his money. He’s in debt but still lives the life of a wealthy young man about town. His £2000 p.a. and her £4000 would be a fine basis for easy living. All his relations think so, a ‘poor’ man marrying the very plain governess for love, what is the sense of doing that. As ever the marriage mart is a theme of Trollope’s.
It’s a very long novel but the narrative tension never slackens. As I wrote having read the books out of turn I wondered about certain outcomes but the author makes it all character centred and credible. The meddling Lady Glencora and Palliser’s quint farthing is a continuing theme from earlier books. An insinuating satire on the mores and manners of Victorian society twenty years before the Queen’s jubilee (1860‘s). George Gissing wrote ‘In the Time of Jubilee’ from the perspective of the lower middle classes if you want a more astringent version of of high Empire when the map was pink. Absolutely superb controlled writing but do read the Palliser novels in sequence.
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