If you know me, you know I love 19th century novels. My absolute favourite 19th century authors being Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope. Actually, Dickens is my absolute favourite author of all time, but I also have a soft spot for Trollope.
Although both writing at during the same period, Dickens is much better known (and by far the better writer in my humble opinion). I love his gritty realism and championship of the working class, and his intricate and instantly recognisable characters. Trollope is much more of a sensational writer, his most well-known stories focusing on landed gentry and titled nobility rather than the working class.
Some of my happiest memories include a monthly trip to the upper floor of Dillons book store where they kept the 19th century literature, to find a Trollope novel I had yet to discover and read it rabidly.
Recently I tidied up my bookshelves and whilst organising my Trollope collection chronologically, I found there were SO MANY MORE BOOKS that I had never managed to get my grubby little hands on. Then and there I vowed to read the lot of them before I die. In chronological order, obviously.
Trollope’s first novel, written whilst he was working for the post office in Ireland, is the Macdermots of Ballycloran. Written in 1843, the book tells the tragic story of the Macdermots, a family hugely in debt and struggling to pay the interest on their heavily mortgaged property. Whilst the Macdermots are, technically, landed gentry, this is different from his later novels. The family are struggling, the father, Larry, brought to idiocy by his long troubles, his son, Thady, trying to scrape together the rent from his tenants in order to get by and keep the falling down roof over their heads. Meanwhile Thady’s romantically inclined sister, Feemy spends her time reading novels and falling in love with the local Revenue Officer Captain Ussher who has made a bad name for himself for arresting the locals for making brewing their own Poteen. To add to the family’s troubles, Usher has been visiting with Feemy rather too often for than is decent without making her an honest woman, leading it to be generally thought that he was making a fool of her.
I struggled to get into this story at first, Trollope’s liberal use of eye dialect was a little off-putting to me at first (I cannot do justice to an Irish accent even in my head!), but by half way through the book I was hooked. None of the characters were particularly sympathetic, apart from possibly the local priest Father John, who is constantly trying to ensure his parishioners didn’t get into too much trouble (which they inevitably did) and lending a kindly and understanding ear to all.
Things take an ugly turn towards the middle of the book and the last several chapters focus on a rather gripping murder trial.
All in all, I really enjoyed this book and am looking forward to reading his second book also one of his “Irish novels”, The Kellys and O’Kellys.
The Macdermots of Ballycloran is in the public domain and can be obtained free from Amazon on Kindle.
