Analysis of Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 2, 2025

Anthony Trollope produced the best-selling novel of its time in this, the third book in his Barsetshire sequence, Doctor Thorne, published in three volumes. He departed from his normal village setting in this novel to consider county characters, focusing on members of high society and their desire for wealth and the status it promised. While the characters resemble those of his other stories, the plot somewhat differs, the reason for which Trollope himself explained in his autobiography.

After completing The Three Clerks (1858), he traveled to Florence, where he asked his brother to help him develop a plot for a new story—the only instance of his ever asking for help with his writing. He adopted his brother’s plot, which offered the potential for creating the typical Victorian sensation fiction, complete with aspects of mistaken or hidden identity and reader titillation leading up to an enormous character revelation. Trollope later seemed bothered by the fact that readers may have begun his novel in anticipation of reading a suspenseful plot, rather than concentrating on the character development that, to Trollope, remained all-important.

The protagonist, Dr. Thomas Thorne, practices medicine in Greshamsbury, where he raises his niece, Mary. He protects the secret of her illegitimate birth, but because Trollope particularly hated sensationalism, he avoided keeping his readers in suspense regarding her heritage. Readers learn by the second chapter that the doctor’s brother, Henry, fathered the girl with Mary, the sister of a stonemason named Roger Scatcherd. When Scatcherd took revenge for his sister’s embarrassment by murdering Henry Thorne, he served time in prison but emerged to become a successful railway contractor, known by the locals as Sir Roger. He lives with his sickly son, Louis, and both have a reputation for occasional drunkenness.

Thus, Trollope avoids another aspect of sensationalism—the emotionally charged reunion between rediscovered family members. Sir Roger’s repugnant personality would devalue for the reader any reunion between himself and Mary.

In the rising action, Mary falls in love with Frank Gresham, son to the local squire, whose family she has known all her life. Although the Greshams like Mary well enough, they want Frank to wed a wealthy woman to relieve the debt leveled against the Gresham estate. Lady Arabella Gresham had long felt she married beneath herself, and she spends her energies trying to pull her family up to her social level. However, the hard times that hit many aristocrats had also visited the Greshams—a fact that Trollope makes clear through ironic dialogue. At one point, Lady Arabella demands that her husband cut off Frank “without a shilling,” to which Gresham replies, “I haven’t a shilling to cut him off with.”

The Greshams’s aristocratic relatives, the DeCourcys, attempt to railroad Frank into marriage with an older spinster, Miss Dunstable, a clever but kind heiress to a fortune.

Trollope’s focus on social differences and class structure gives the novel its excellence. His rendition of the incomes and possessions of the landed gentry reflect his usual superbly detailed realism, allowing readers a look inside the life of those who aspired to aristocratic life. As a self-described conservative liberal, Trollope supported England’s aristocracy, believing it would alleviate social ills suffered by lower classes. His narrative reveals the pressures on the landed populace by the newly wealthy, who could buy lands that old families might have mortgaged to support the costs of estates and family businesses long allowed to run themselves.

This precarious situation also allows Trollope to incorporate humor as he affectionately pokes fun at the attitudes of those who take wealth and status for granted. Retaining the best aspects of an approach made popular in the 18th century by epistolary novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Trollope introduces correspondence between the vainly ambitious Augusta Gresham, Frank’s sister, who wants to marry a lawyer, Mr. Mortimer Gazebee, and her hypocritical and presumptuous cousin, Lady Amelia De Courcy.

Gazebee desires to marry into Augusta’s social status, but she is betrayed by Lady Amelia, who forces Augusta to adopt her view of Gazebee as unworthy. The two women discuss their responsibilities toward their “blood” and social position, creating a comic effect in their stance outside the boundaries of life’s realities experienced by the majority of the population. Lady Amelia convinces Augusta that Gazebee is beneath her, writing, “It is not permitted us, my dear Augusta, to think of ourselves in such matters. As you truly say, if we were to act in that way, what would the world come to?” All the while, Lady Amelia schemes to win Gazebee for herself.

The two women provide excellent contrast to Thorne’s unpretentious prosperity. While Mary and Frank occupy the novel’s romantic center, Dr. Thorne serves as its moral center. A conservative who values rank and stability, he nevertheless raises his illegitimate niece and projects no false gentility.

Mary and Frank despair until both Sir Roger and Louis die, leaving the Scatcherd fortune to Mary, who learns of her heritage. Her sudden wealth causes the Greshams to accept her. In spite of the facts of Mary’s birth, she becomes engaged to Frank. The old way of life triumphs over the new as Mary’s inherited old money shores up the lands of the Greshams.

One critic writing for the Saturday Review expressed concern over the author’s flaunting of moral convention through Mary’s illegitimacy. He felt that Trollope featured only the delights of romance and none of its pitfalls, encouraging young readers to marry without prudence. His was one of few critical voices.

Bibliography
Glendinning, Victoria. Anthony Trollope. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Skilton, David. Introduction to Doctor Thorne, by Anthony Trollope. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.