Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 3, 2025

First published in The Cornhill Magazine from January 1860 through April 1861, Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage was the fourth in his Barsetshire novels sequence. That sequence had opened in 1855 with The Warden and would conclude with The Last Chronicle of Barset in 1867. Trollope had never intended to write the series. While the third in the series, Doctor Thorne (1859), garnered a measure of success, he had not planned a fourth. Fortunately, circumstances dictated that he do so.

At the end of 1859, Trollope returned from the West Indies and began work on an Irish novel titled Castle Richmond. He offered the work for serial publication to George Smith, who operated the newly founded Cornhill Magazine. Smith liked the idea of publishing a Trollope work, but he wanted another English novel, and Trollope obligingly produced Framley Parsonage in a matter of weeks.

Despite a weak critical reception, readers immensely enjoyed encountering again some of their favorite characters from previous novels in the sequence. They recognized the Grantlys and their foolish daughter Griselda, who in this sequence marries Lord Dumbello, a perfectly named match for her. They also knew well Bishop Proudie and his wife, the grasping, selfish, and decidedly un-Christian Mrs. Proudie. In addition, this novel continued the character development of Reverend Josiah Crawley, Trollope’s saddest and most pitiable character.

Despite the novel’s popularity, The Examiner’s critic found Trollope without “a touch of original fancy,” adding that he shaped his characters with lack of insight, while the Saturday Review deemed the work of a quality fit only for “circulating libraries.” Later critics redeemed Framley Parsonage, as in Graham Handley’s evaluation of the work as “carefully constructed” and “artistically coherent.”

In addition to familiar characters, the plot introduces a large cast of newcomers to Trollope’s quiet setting. The living at Framley Parsonage is presented by the widowed aristocrat Lady Lufton to Mark Robarts, a friend of her son, Lord Ludovic Lufton. While Robarts seems ostensibly the book’s protagonist, much of the novel’s attention will focus on two romantic subplots, one involving Robarts’s sister, Lucy, and her foil, the pretty but intellectually unchallenged Griselda Grantly.

Robarts meets Mr. Sowerby, whose profligate ways will affect Robarts, and the Duke of Omnium, whose lack of discretion will pull Robarts into further difficulty. Both badly influence the naïve Robarts, who offends Lady Lufton by agreeing to sign for Sowerby’s debts, despite his hesitation to do so. When he tells Sowerby, “As a clergyman it would be wrong of me,” Sowerby responds, “If there be one class of men whose names would be found more frequent on the backs of bills in the provincial banks than another, clergymen are that class.” Robarts loses sleep worrying about the £400 debt, although he is promised a prebendary, or special endowment at Barchester, for his action. His devoted wife, Fanny, warns him against overindulgence, but, enthralled with high society, Robarts accumulates additional debt.

In the meantime, Lord Lufton falls madly in love with Lucy Robarts, but she resists his advances because she knows that Lady Lufton does not approve of the relationship due to Lucy’s middle-class standing. Lucy lies, telling Ludovic that she does not love him, as she cannot bear the thought of Lady Lufton spreading rumors that she had trapped her son. Her insistence that Ludovic’s mother approve of their marriage eventually influences Lady Lufton to admire her integrity and eventually agree to the match. Critics tout Lucy and Lady Lufton as two of Trollope’s best female characterizations.

For a novel that centers on the clergy, Framley Parsonage produces few church characters that act in a Christian way. Mrs. Proudie behaves in the most hypocritical manner, instigating a plan to break up the engagement of Griselda and Lord Dumbello, due to her jealousy. The self-centered Harold Smith declares himself a Christian, yet proves in reality to be a grasping and selfish politician. Mark Robarts allows himself to be led astray by the promise of social status. Even Archbishop Grantly displays little Christian behavior.

Instead, Lucy represents the only true practicing Christian through her self-sacrifice. However, she does not become a stereotypical blameless sacrificial female lamb to her culture’s social mores. She clearly regrets the loss of the fine life she might have led as Lord Lufton’s wife, even though the narrator prefaces her thought by stating, “that girls should not marry for money we are all agreed.” He goes on to compare such a marriage to the sale of sheep and oxen.

Instead, she struggles with a lack of self-confidence that she must overcome in order to convince Lady Lufton that she will make a good match for her son, and even when she succeeds in developing that inner strength, Lady Lufton cannot fully participate without first experiencing her own conversion. Lucy places herself in physical danger by nursing the long-suffering Mrs. Crawley, and this display of raw humanity does influence Lady Lufton. But only when Lady Lufton also experiences self-conflict, understanding that she may lose her son in an attempt to force him to marry the undesirable Griselda Grantly for all the wrong reasons, does she capitulate. In one of Trollope’s strongest scenes, Lady Lufton actually proposes to Lucy on behalf of her own son.

Lucy also allows Trollope to emphasize the sad character of Reverend Crawley, whose mania he may have based on the mad melancholy that often gripped Trollope’s father. Forced to live in the poverty inherent to his assignment at Hogglestock, caring for an impossibly large family, Crawley becomes a tyrant, inflicting his pain on his wife, who is in no way strong enough to bear up under the assault. Misplaced pride denies his family relief in the way of charity and leads to the reverend’s emotional disintegration. His painful existence is exacerbated by the necessary comparisons to his one-time good friend Dr. Arabin, the Dean of Barchester, whom he cannot forgive for having paid his debts. Crawley likely exists to demonstrate that suffering may not always prove ennobling.

Eventually Ludovic must rescue the overly ambitious Robarts, who has managed to accumulate debts living beyond his income. Robarts then vows to return to the business of the parsonage, foregoing the idle life of the high social class. However, Sowerby’s debts are too enormous for rescue, and the duke has a lien on all his property. He hopes to alleviate his problems by marrying the wealthy Miss Dunstable. She, however, refuses, choosing instead to marry the sensible Dr. Thorne, the one man she knows does not love her for her money.

Trollope demonstrates through Griselda, Lucy, and Miss Dunstable that material goods should not dictate marriage. While he does not create a purely happy ending for all involved in his novel, it does end happily for the characters that deserve such a conclusion. While Lucy is filled with pride as the plot resolves itself, her pride is the type “in no way disgraceful to either man or woman.”