If social historians are to be trusted, the actual world behind the shadow play of Barsetshire was almost as immutably fixed in its rules and as limited by congenially narrow horizons as were Trollope’s characters. My own opinion, which is no more likely to be confirmed than other estimates of the dead by the living, is that past eras were never quite so categorically neat as hindsight would make them. Nevertheless, in those days even so socially aware a novelist as Dickens both raised and solved his issues in terms of the sentimental situation, still sharing with his readers and characters more premises than many are likely to share securely in our time. The novelist, thus freed or healthily restricted, could preoccupy himself with human weakness in an environment already assessed, could still accept a great portion of his world as having been deeded him by a fiat for which he did not hold himself responsible. Since then, the world, and the novel with it, has been busy investigating its premises.
