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who gains a ‘trousseau’, and his concerns over the hem of his long clerical frock and his other new clothes are part of thegentle comedy of the last pages of the novel. It is not likely that Trollope would forget to provide Mr Crawley and his wife and daughters with new clothes, considering the humiliations of his own early life. As much as his daughter’s trousseau, Mr Crawley’s new clothes mark his rite of passage into society, a passage that Trollope himself had sought for many years before his success in the Post Office and as a writer. Mr Crawley’s ‘trousseau’ is one of the ‘loose strings’ that come at the end of
The Last Chronicle
of which Trollope writes that he will tie ‘together in a knot, so that my work will not become untwisted’ (Ch. 84 ). But his work will always become ‘untwisted’, by readers’ expectations and desires as they live with the characters beyond the novel, and by the novel’s own unravelling of ‘the stern laws of the world’ and of the morality which it professes to uphold. These subtle untwistings, evasions and accommodations of Victorian social laws and moral truths fuel the reader’s anxiety, but are also the lasting attraction and pleasure of Trollope’s novels.
NOTES
    1 . Anne Thackeray Ritchie, quoted in
Trollope: Interviews and Recollections
, ed. R. C. Terry (London, 1987), pp. 87 –8.
    2 . From an article in
St Martin’s Le Grand
6 (July 1896). Selections reprinted in
Trollope: Interviews and Recollections
, p. 62 .
    3 . Nathaniel Hawthorne, quoted in Anthony Trollope,
An Autobiography
, ed. David Skilton (London, 1996), p. 96 .
    4 . Unsigned notice,
London Review
15, 20 July 1867, p. 81. Reprinted in
Trollope: The Critical Heritage
, ed. Donald Smalley (London, 1969), p. 299 .
    5 . Trollope,
An Autobiography
, p. 26 .
    6 . Letter from Anthony Trollope to George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, 27 February 1872, in
The Letters of Anthony Trollope
, ed. N. John Hall, 2 vols. (Stanford, 1983), 2, pp. 557–8. The first volume of John Forster’s biography of Dickens was published late in 1871. It contained Dickens’s ‘autobiographical fragment’ in which he tells of his hard childhood and parental neglect. Forster made it clear that Mr Micawber had been drawn from aspects of Dickens’s father’s character.
    7 . Trollope,
An Autobiography
, p. 11 .
    8 . Ibid., p. 61 .
    9 . Ibid., p. 181 .
    10 . Ibid., p. 179 .
    11 .
Authentic Catalogue: Apsley House, Piccadilly, the Town Residence of His Grace, the Duke of Wellington
, London, 1853.
    12 . See Marie F. Busco, ‘The ‘‘Achilles’’ in Hyde Park’,
Burlington Magazine
, January 1990, pp. 920–24.
    13 . Unsigned notice,
Spectator
40, 13 July 1867, pp. 778 –80. Reprinted in Smalley,
Trollope: The Critical Heritage
, p. 296 .
    14 . Margaret Oliphant, ‘Novels’ in
Blackwood’s Magazine
102, September 1867 pp. 277 –8. Reprinted in Smalley,
Trollope: The Critical Heritage
, p. 303 .
    15 . J. Hillis Miller,
The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin
(New York, 1987), pp. 98 –9.
    FURTHER READING
    Trollope’s own assessment of many of his novels, including
The Last Chronicle of Barset
, is given in his fascinating and revealing work
An Autobiography
, which he wrote in 1875–6 and then locked in a box for his son to publish after his death (London, 1883; reprinted by Penguin, 1996). There has been much work on Trollope’s life in the late twentieth century, and the best of the critical biographies are N. John Hall’s excellent
Trollope: A Biography
(Oxford, 1991), and Victoria Glendinning’s
Trollope
(London, 1992) which presents a brilliantly detailed view of Trollope’s milieu, and ventures confidently on fairly uncharted territory in its attention to the role and influence of Trollope’s wife, Rose. Other scholarly