Frances Trollope wrote many novels, but most critics agree The Vicar of Wrexhill is her best. Framed in her normally intrusive, authorial didactic voice, the novel focuses on corruption in the Church of England. Her combined themes of religious and gender conflict would later serve her son Anthony Trollope as well as they had her, although he would learn to abandon the judgmental voice for which his mother was well known. For that reason, his novels generally offered stronger appeal for later generations.

The Vicar of Wrexhill is also noted for one characteristic of its narrative structure. In the first 200 pages of the three-volume work, 11 epistles appear. While not an epistolary novel, its feature of this mode, introduced in English work by Samuel Richardson a century before, adds interest for the various voices they represent, both female and male.

Readers are introduced to a family with the symbolic surname of Freeman in the early pages. The narrator’s description of the Freemans’ alehouse, the Mowbray Arms, leaves little doubt regarding Trollope’s staunch belief in the Protestant work ethic: “Industry, neatness, and their fitting accompaniment and reward, comfort, were legible throughout the small domain.” Of the “decent peasant-boy” hired to help the Freemans, the narrator remarks, “and happy was the cottager whose son got the appointment, for both in morals and manners the horseboy at the Mowbray Arms might have set an example to his betters.”

The description of the Mowbray family continues the idyllic tone, with the young Master Mowbray preparing to celebrate his coming of age. However, disaster strikes with the death of Charles Mowbray, Sr., a matter of much grief for his family, which includes, in addition to Charles, Jr., Mrs. Clara Mowbray, Charles’s older sister Helen, and their younger sister, 16-year-old Fanny. Their circle also includes the orphan Rosalind Torrington, whose mother had been “high born,” but was cut off by a family dismayed over her choice of a husband, an Irish Protestant clergyman. The Mowbrays love Rosalind and treat her as one of their own.

Into the Mowbrays’ grief appears a dastardly antagonist in the form of William Jacob Cartwright, Vicar of Wrexhill. He begins to insinuate himself into the Mowbray family, proving to be one of the more calculating, loathsome, and cruel men of the cloth in fiction. According to information from George Mason University’s Ellen Moody, one reviewer in The Athenaeum described the Vicar of Wrexhill as “handsome, silkly spoken, with his black eyes and caressing hands, which make such sad havoc among the bevy of admiring village ladies. He glides on his way, like a serpent—glossy, silent and poisonous—throwing out hints here, innuendos there; blighting with the language of brotherly love, and under the mask of Scriptural sanctity, creeping steadily upwards towards wealth and power. His is a fearful character.” Trollope’s use of the snake/serpent imagery usually reserved for women results in a neat reversal of tradition and associates Cartwright with temptation of a sexual nature.

His first wriggling into the Mowbray space involves his calling on the family following their bereavement, after which Rosalind declares her frank dislike of his too-smooth personality.

Cartwright returns to hear the reading of Mr. Mowbray’s will, attended traditionally only by males, and learns along with Charles, Jr., and his friend and supporter, Sir Gilbert Harrington, that Clara Mowbray received all her husband’s estate. Charles steps outside to spend a moment with Sir Gilbert, returning to find Rosalind upset and accusatory, scolding him for not presenting the facts of the will to his mother herself. The confused Charles learns that the vicar has superseded him in speaking with his mother, a fact that incenses Rosalind, although she is relieved that Charles had not purposely ignored his mother. Not only has the vicar shared information that was not his to share, he presented it in such a way that Mrs. Mowbray believed her son to be unhappy about the will’s provisions, which he is not in the least.

As the lengthy plot develops, other locals enter the fray, including Cartwright’s son Jacob and daughter Henrietta; the widowed Mrs. Simpson, who occasionally ignores her eight-year-old daughter, distracted by fashions; the widow Mrs. Richardson, devoted to her husband’s memory and left with three daughters to raise; the gentle Mrs. Williams; and the dashing Colonel Harrington, Sir Gilbert’s son. Some of the local women will be caught in Cartwright’s trap, too naïve to realize his advances and attentions are inappropriate.

Eventually Cartwright convinces Mrs. Mowbray to marry him and gains through her wealth even greater power in the community, as he oversees her writing of a will leaving all her possessions to him. He even withholds power from Rosalind to take possession of the inheritance that she receives from her father’s repentant family. And the consequences almost prove disastrous to Helen Mowbray, pursued by Cartwright’s weaselly cousin, Mr. Stephen Corbold—all this while Charles is absent at school. While Helen proves intelligent enough to escape Corbold’s advances, and Colonel Harrington literally horsewhips him for his insolence, Cartwright’s own daughter cannot be rescued from the loss of faith she experiences due to her father and her subsequent alienation from him. Her deathbed scene allows Trollope to deliver one of the more didactic speeches in the novel, this one on the subject of truth.

When Cartwright turns away from his own daughter’s plea for assurance of God’s existence, saying, “You have lived a scoffing infidel,—and a scoffing infidel will you die,” he reveals his true villainy.

The novel satisfactorily concludes, as it began, with a will, written by Clara Cartwright, who died soon after delivering Cartwright’s son, who also died. A codicil drawn up secretly with the help of Sir Gilbert left everything to the Mowbray children, with not one penny left to the dastardly Cartwright. Cartwright Park returns to Mowbray Park, and the vicar disappears. The colonel and Helen marry, as do Charles and Rosalind, and the village “once more became happy and gay, and the memory of their serious epidemic rendered its inhabitants the most orderly, peaceable, and orthodox population in the whole country.”

In Trollope’s day her novel was widely read, mentioned in a satire by William Makepeace Thackeray’s Roundabout Papers titled “On a Lazy Idle Boy,” in which he pondered whether novelists read many novels. He theorized that they did not, as too much fiction proves “cloying,” and asks whether “the author of the Vicar of Wrexhill laugh[s] over the Warden and the The Three Clerks?” His question proved ironic on two fronts, of course, as neither book mentioned is meant to be humorous and both were written by Trollope’s son Anthony.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 19th century novels, Anthony Trollope influence, Church of England corruption, Clara Mowbray, didactic narration, Ellen Moody Trollope, epistolary elements, female authors and religious critique, Frances Trollope, gender conflict in literature, inheritance plot, literary reversal of gender tropes, literary villain William Cartwright, Protestant work ethic, religious satire, Rosalind Torrington, Roundabout Papers, serpent imagery in literature, social commentary in fiction, Thackeray satire, The Vicar of Wrexhill, Victorian family dynamics, Victorian Literature, Victorian moral values, Victorian novel structure, victorian women writers