Constructing the moral self: Trollope, fellowship, and the ends of life

This study examines novelist Anthony Trollope's self-designation as an advanced conservative Liberal. In using the term, Trollope lays out the framework of a nuanced moral philosophy, one that makes lessening distances between people the central concern. Trollope emphasizes how his vision is resolutely forward looking, how the ends he has in mind are not merely more of the same. The insistence on gradual change is not a ruse for avoiding change altogether and bolstering the status quo. Instead, it is in his eyes the only strategy that can provide real hope of coming closer to the "human millennium." That the successful novelist, any successful novelist, could not avoid influencing his or her readers was axiomatic for Trollope; to influence for good rather than ill was the mission. By promoting "fellowship" in particular--a word he uses often, sometimes to mean community, sometimes love or friendship between two people, and sometimes even the ties between author and reader--Trollope makes room for, even welcomes, the "police." It is not merely that one can never fully escape policing, no matter how much one might want to; rather, it would be profoundly self-destructive to try too hard. Yet Trollope is also alert to the damaging effects of excessive normalization and social control; in many ways, his work tests in fictional form ideas set forth by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. In following Trollope as he moves from the beginning to the end of the Barsetshire series (The Warden, 1855, and The Last Chronicle of Barset, 1867, respectively), then on to Phineas Finn (1869) and Phineas Redux (1874) in the Palliser series, then on to his autobiography (written 1876) and an essay entitled "A Walk in a Wood" (1880), we can trace his efforts to depict the formation of vital selfhood--the pleasures of constructing a stable identity, and the dangers of settling for an identity too solidly formed.