Consolation

Have I really not posted anything about Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy before? I thought I would look up what I said on this site during my earlier reading of the book. But it appears that I last drew consolation from Boethius’s philosophy in 2008, two years before I started this blog. In those early years, I wrote lots of posts about books I had read previously, but apparently not about this one.

Boethius was a Roman senator and a philosopher living in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. He was a Christian who also loved reading and teaching the Greek classics and in fact translated many of them for the Latin-speaking world. He and Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville helped promote an outline for learning that lasted for over a thousand years. In this curriculum, beginners studied grammar, logic, and rhetoric. (In the twentieth century, some elementary schools were still called “grammar schools” because of this tradition.) These subjects formed the group of three roads, or trivium. Because the material is for the young, we get our word “trivia” from its title, as in, “What a beginner learns is trivial.” The word has had fifteen hundred years to morph, though. We now might say that much of what a beginner learns is essential, not trivial in that sense. And “trivia” is now thought of as esoteric knowledge, less so on Tuesday nights at the pub and more so on Jeopardy! Knowing that the word “trivia” comes from the trivium constitutes an excellent piece of trivia, I’d say, and I’d be super excited to see it come up on the great game show.

I digress from my digression of biographical background. After learning how to get one’s thoughts together and express them convincingly, students following the plan of Boethius et al. next studied the quadrivium: the mathematical disciplines of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. (These wise people acknowledged that knowledge of music theory was essential toward understanding how the world works!) Once a student had become a “master” of the quadrivium (hence the name of the second degree in the universities that would rise some 700 years after Boethius), he could move on to professional study in the pinnacle fields of law, medicine, philosophy, or theology. Those who finished this course were qualified to teach doctrine in those upcoming universities, and hence were called “doctors.” In our times, most people graduating from the third program of higher education in areas other than law, medicine, or theology receive a degree known as “Doctor of Philosophy”: PhD. All of this to say that Boethius’s books have been so influential that many of their ideas and terms remain with us after a millennia-and-a-half.

But Boethius fell out of grace with the government in 523 and was imprisoned. Feeling every wretched thought one might think in that situation, he began to think of the philosophy he had learned from Plato & Co. as something more than academic knowledge – as helpful, inspiring, consoling knowledge. And he memorialized the journey of his heart in the remarkable book known as The Consolation of Philosophy, which he wrote between the time of his incarceration and the time of his execution a year later. He begins the book by bemoaning his fate and then declaring that the figure of Philosophy personified appeared to him to teach him his lesson.

Or to re-teach him, rather. Philosophy’s first point is that Boethius is unhappy because he has forgotten the end of all things and the means by which the world is governed. But he can’t simply be told those things. Learning – either the first or the second time – is a process. She tells her author that she must start with basic ideas that her student can handle now and progress only slowly to the great lessons of ultimate things he must relearn. Clearly, Philosophy has read his other books and knows to start with the trivia! So she begins the course by pointing out that it is better to be grateful for all one has rather than resentful for all one has lost. Wouldn’t it be great if we all felt better after hearing that?

But we don’t. So now she starts to talk about true happiness. Everyone agrees that the goal of life is happiness: it makes no sense to say that you want to be happy so you can use that happiness for a further goal. But what is happiness? Is it power, as some say? Is it wealth? Is it pleasure? All have their advocates, but none of these can be true happiness. What powerful person doesn’t have to keep constant guard over his power lest he lose it all? Is it really power then? And can it possibly be ultimate happiness if it can be lost at any moment? Similarly, no wealthy person is either satisifed with wealth or confident that the wealth is safe. And pleasure is the least stable, reliable blessing of the three. The problem is, she explains, that philosophers have divided true happiness up. True happiness consists of all these things together: power is good only if it is pleasant, and wealth is pleasant only if the wealthy has the power to keep it, and pleasure is only good if one has the means to attain it. (Notice here that Philosophy is actually a critic of philosophy!) She then says that the happy one must be powerful, wealthy, and comfortable (she talks of other goods: I’ve narrowed down the list so my post isn’t as long as Boethius’s book) not as possessing these things but in his very nature. And this is true only of the one God. Any true happiness on the part of a human, then, must come from participating in godliness.

OK, but now Boethius has some questions. If happiness depends on God, then what about fate and chance? Is God bound by either? Why do bad things happen to us if He isn’t? And what about free will? If God knows everything, how can we be free? And if we’re not free, how can we be happy? Like a lot of us, even those of us who haven’t been put in prison and await execution, Boethius doesn’t want be happy and good and godly and serve the Creator and Sustainer of the universe just because it’s the right thing to do: he wants some answers! The post is long enough. I’ll only say that Philosophy provides very good answers to these questions; if she didn’t the book wouldn’t have brought actual consolation to so many people over so many centuries.

Maybe I’ve said enough to entice you to find the answers in this book. Just try not to wait until the government comes to get you.

PS: I’m pleased to see that blogspot's editor knows the words “trivium” and “quadrivium.” I’m confused to find that it doesn’t known the word “sustainer.” But then it doesn’t know the word “blogspot,” either!

First 2026 Roundup

Apology: I forgot to press "publish" on the 20th.

I’ve had a good start with my reading list in the first three weeks of the New Year – such a good start that I have five things to report on already.

I started the year with some plays. Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers was entertaining and interesting, but was it really worthy of a Pulitzer? Two Jewish boys have to live for a year with their grandmother, who, in Yonkers now as the title suggests, has previously lived the difficult life of a Jew in early twentieth-century Europe. She’s hard and prickly and tells the boys it does no good to be sentimental. Her daughter, the boys’ aunt, confronts her for being so harsh, and the scene is interesting and provides a vehicle for the actors’ emotional display, but does either character come to a conclusion or learn a lesson? Or is the lesson that some people are just abrasive? I guess the grandsons accept her in the end even if her children don’t exactly.

Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, also a Pulitzer winner, was better. But, boy! was it weird! The family depicted is so crazy and dysfunctional, the audience (or reader) is left wondering how much is real and how much is in the imagination of . . . of somebody in this broken family. In some ways, hardly anything happens: half the first act consists of a conversation between a man on a couch and his wife, who is offstage. But the “action” of unfolding the psychology of these relationships is intense. And, yes, the title of the play indicates the elephant in the room: there is a child buried in the garden tha no one wants to mention.

I’ve read about a dozen books by Jules Verne, and he’s only disappointed me once (Michael Strogoff). He famously likes science but often gets it wrong. He loves geography and exploration even more but often gets that wrong. I think he wants his heroes to be godless rationalists but – thank heaven! – doesn’t get that quite right, either. And yet it all works, and it all makes me happy. The spirit of adventure and wonder in the not-so-accurate world Verne depicts is captivating and inspiring, and Around the World in Eighty Days provided fascinating treats on every page, even though I’d read it before. Phileas Fogg is described as being entirely mechanical, but he’s like Oz’s Tin Woodman: he has a heart that beats passionately once duty calls it into service. And Passepartout is one of the great sidekicks in literature: his position is maybe not so lofty as Sancho’s or Watson’s, but he’s close.

I have two quick, extra notes about Around the World. First, the narration says early on that Fogg was a member of the Reform Club (an actual institution in London) and replaced one of its great orators. I had to look this up! Who was the great orator of the Reform Club that Verne’s fictional character was supposed to have “replaced.” My internet search led me to a list of fictional members of the Reform Club, a list that included, from a Trollope book appearing just four years earlier – wait for it – Phineas Finn! Look at those names: Phileas Fogg and Phineas Finn. Can there be any doubt that Verne at least got his character’s name from Trollope’s? And maybe the fictional Finn is even the great orator that Fogg supposedly overshadowed. 

Second, I reported at the end of last year that I would try to read this book in French. I read it at a normal pace in English (well, normal for me, which is rather slow), but I am indeed also reading a bit of it in French every day. I’m in chapter 3 of the French, so I’ll probably finish it up around June if I can keep up the pace. The vocabulary is harder than I thought it would be, but I’m slowly learning. The goal is to practice on this familiar novel with good English translations (I read Butcher’s) that can serve as guides, so that later, sometime in the next few years, I can read some of Verne’s more obscure novels in French without having to rely on the problematic English translations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I’m also following through on my idea to read just one “directive” from chapter 3 of Richard Baxter’s Practical Works each day. That plan isn’t working as well as reading Verne in French. I’ll say more in a few weeks when either the piecewise reading has started to work or I’ve given up on the experiment.

Book Awards – 2025

Year 9 of my Third Decade of planned reading reaches an end today. You know what that means. It’s time for America’s favorite awards show: the exlibrismagnis Book Awards for 2025!

On this last day of 25 squared, I see that a year ago I wrote that I was most looking forward to reading Graham Greene’s Quiet American, Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and Pascal’s Pensées. Will any of them win awards? Let’s get started and find out!

Author whose name most closely resembles “Charles Dickens”: Charles Dickens
Yes, I always give my favorite author his own category so that other fictional writers have a reasonable chance of an award. I wrote in my personal notes for this year that the words “dismal,” “lugubrious,” “melancholy,” “moody,” “moodily,” “gloomy,” and “sullen” came up frequently in Our Mutual Friend, but I still found it a joyful book. I do love the book itself, but a big part of my attachment to it is the memory I have of reading it the first time together with my dad and my fiancé some 45 years ago.

Best On-List Fiction: Scott, Ivanhoe
This book was so much better than I remembered and so much smarter than any of the other wonderful Scott books I’ve read in the last few years! Just reread my post on it from March to see why it won this award.

Best Off-List Fiction: Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
The best recent fiction I’ve read in a few years! At a time when we need a stern reminder that the nobility has a horrible habit of abusing its privilege and should be narrowly proscribed, this lovely book shows us that nobility, i.e. greatness of heart is healing and generous and must be free to expand as far as possible, especially to children in need.

Best New Read in History: William J Cooper, Jefferson Davis: American
I didn’t write a post about this book earlier. While I think face-to-face political conversations are important, I usually try to avoid hot political topics in social media, and, unfortunately, Davis is the subject of very recent political actions and high emotions. But this biography is getting an award, so, with your indulgence, I’ll stray from my normal policy for just a moment. Some people argue that tearing down a statue erases history. Rejoinder 1: Tearing down a statue only erases “history” for someone who doesn’t read. Rejoinder 2: A statue is more than history: it exalts a person and the cause he stands for, so tearing it down is more about approval or disapproval of a part of history than it is about telling that history. Now I will be briefly political and state a position that I still can’t quite believe is controversial: I don’t think we need statues in this country venerating a man who broke his solemn oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and who instead directed armies to kill U. S. soldiers in order to preserve a supposed right to enslave human beings. But I think we need lots of books about him. And this was a good one! Political mode is off now.

Most Confounding Read in History: Nathan Miller, New World Coming
In my long, frustrated post from October, I said that I found in Miller a paragraph that I had just read in John Milton Cooper’s Pivotal Decades. After I wrote that, I found the passage in Cooper, and now to be totally fair I should say that Miller didn’t follow Cooper (who wrote a couple of decades earlier) word for word and that Cooper’s passage was about twice as long. Nevertheless, the two passages were very similar: Miller referred to four of the approximately eight points or examples that Cooper had listed in his passage, he gave them in the same order, and he used similar language. I would accept the borrowing as ethical if Miller had only given credit, but he didn’t refer to Cooper in the prose, and Cooper isn’t mentioned in footnotes or the biography. And yet I learned a lot from Miller’s book. Confounding!

Most Historians Read This Year with the Same Last Name: William J. Cooper and John Milton Cooper

Best Drama: Shakespeare, The Tempest
Do I really need to defend this award?

Best Reread in Poetry: Milton, Paradise Lost
Or this one?

Best New Read in Poetry: Thomas Warton, “The Pleasures of Melancholy”
I had planned for ten years to spend two to three weeks with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and of Edwin Arlington Robinson this year. On the other hand, I read some of Warton’s poetry in two days near the end of the year because of some stray tip that I got from a forgotten source. And yet it was Warton that moved me most. I’m sure the topic of this particular poem was a big part of the reason.

Best New Read in Religion: Richard Baxter, Practical Works, ch. 3
I was shocked to find that this chapter was 300 pages long, too long for the amount of time I had allotted to read a single chapter of a book, but grateful to find it written in a highly organized outline format that allowed me to skim it meaningfully. Even though I didn’t read every word, the words I did read were very good, and I strongly need to consider the plan I suggested in my earlier post: to reread the maybe 200-300 topic sentences this year, one per day, and let each one roll around in my soul for a few hours.

Best Reread: Pascal, Pensées
Even though, as I reported earlier this year, I was disappointed to find that this collection of notes and thoughts and ideas for a great religious treatise didn’t hit me in the gut this time the way it has in the past, I still consider this life-changing volume the greatest book never written.

I apologize for the straightforward, relatively unimaginative awards post this year. I read over last year’s awards in preparing to write today and was quite pleased with the way the muses moved me 365 days ago. But the job has been done, and the world has been enlightened. As usual, I’ll take a couple of lines to say what I’m most looking forward to next year. It’s hard to narrow down a list I’m very excited about, but I’ll say that my anticipation centers most on The Lord of the Rings, Jon Meacham’s recent biography of Lincoln, Romeo and Juliet, Sidney Lanier’s A Boy’s King Arthur, and Les Miserables. I’m also looking forward to attempting to read Around the World in Eighty Days in the original French. Now that I think about it, I may have to restructure next year’s awards to accommodate a lot of rereading!

May your New Year’s Day be filled with happy memories of good books (and other highlights!) and fond hopes for books you plan to read in 2026. I’ll be with you through the last year of my Third Decade plan, and at least one of my posts in the coming year will offer highlights of my plan for a Fourth Decade. Happy New Year!

I Owe John Dewey an Apology

It’s amazing how reading a philosopher can differ fro hearing about a philosopher. I appear to have had a wrong understanding about John Dewey for quite a while. I thought he stood for the destruction of all I hold dear in education and the promotion of all I hold silly. But earlier this month, I read his Experience and Education and came away with a very different view of him.

I’ve had teachers tell me that the days of teachers claiming authority and imparting information is over, that students must teach themselves, that social control is constricting, and that true learning is about doing and not about thinking. And I’ve heard these people praising John Dewey. “What are you talking about?” I’d say. “Well, have you read any John Dewey?” they’d respond. Now notice that, even if they were right about what John Dewey said, by claiming that reading John Dewey would set me straight, they’re admitting that John Dewey proved himself an authority, had information to impart, and expected me to think his way, thus undermining everything they said he stood for.

But they weren’t right about Dewey. Or, at least, they weren’t right about the way he represents his philosophy of education in this book. Dewey says that teachers do have a position of authority founded on their greater knowledge and experience, but he says they must exercise it in a way more conducive to learning than simply by expecting every student to sit still for long periods every day listening to said teacher’s monologues. He says that social control is necessary and that done right, as with the social control effected by the rules of a game, social rules can bring about freedom. He says that students must be active participants in their education but never says anything that could be taken to mean that they will learn all information and skills by themselves if only given the chance; he says instead that the teacher, with greater knowledge nd understanding of goals, must be the leader of a group activity. And, far from saying that learning is about doing and not thinking, he makes it very clear that one of the most important lessons for young people is to learn to think before acting.

The book had some problems, and I certainly didn’t agree with everything. But for now I’ll just say that I owe Dewey an apology: for years I’ve mentally accused him of saying things that he didn’t say. Again, at least not in this book. I’ve only read the one, so I’m not an authority!

Friends in Arcadia

I finished reading my list for year 9 yesterday. We have big plans for Christmas week, and I have some sleep to catch up on, so I thought I’d try to write about two books in one post today. That strategy hasn’t saved time in the past, but I’m determined today!

First up is Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship. Aelred of Rievaulx, a twelfth-century monk, loved Cicero’ treatise On Friendship but regretted the world not having a guide to friendship with specifically Christian content because, as he says, without Christ true friendship is not possible. I loved reading through this happy little book of medieval philosophy. Aelred portrays a friendship based on complete trust and mutual enjoyment of good things. For such a relationship, he says, one must select candidates and “test” them (through observation!) before approving them. Reject the irascible, the unstable, the suspicious, and the verbose, he advises. But if a person passes the test and becomes your friend, stick by that friend in almost all circumstances. Even if he plots treason, warn the state quickly, but don’t give up your friendship. Notice that the commandment of love is perfectly compatible with sending your friend to prison (for his good and the safety of the community). But, wow! If a traitorous plot doesn’t end friendship, can anything? Yes, Aelred tells us. My heart thudded when I read these words describing a sadly familiar feeling: “Nothing tortures the spirit more than abandonment or attack by a friend.” Your friend can become a former friend through five means: slander, reproach, pride, betrayal of secrets, or a “treacherous blow.” Even should such a heart-breaking split occur, though, out of respect for the former friendship, one must still be ever willing and ready to offer help and advice if asked for. What a lovely guide for a world filled with broken, self-centered, cruel beings!

Now I must say a few words about Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. I’ll avoid the story of trying to figure out whether I was buying the “Old Arcadia” or the “New Arcadia.” I got a Complete Works on Kindle and read the longer of the two options. If you’re ever in the mood for a 600-page, 16th-century pastoral, I recommend you do the same. I will warn you, though. I found Sidney a little harder to understand than either Chaucer or Mallory in their original language and spelling. There may be translations into modern English, but, as I hinted at before, I don’t know which of those contain the short, original version or the “director’s cut” that he produced later in his life. 

I enjoyed the story a lot. It felt like reading a novel-length narration of a Shakespeare story, and for good reason: it includes a lot of bits and pieces that commonly made their way into stories and plays back then. Take the case of young Pyrocles, who disguises himself as a girl named Zelmane (for reasons I never really fully bought). The king of Arcadia falls in love with “her,” and the queen, seeing through the disguise, falls in love with Pyrocles. This part reminded me of Twelfth Night. So Pyrocles attempts to solve his problem and theirs by inviting them both to a tryst in a cave at night. This part reminded me of any number of Shakespeare comedies. Pyrocles’ plot doesn’t unfold according to plan, of course, and Sidney gets another hundred pages out of the mix-up. There are shipwrecks and rescued princesses and love potions — OK, speaking of heartbreak, yesterday’s tragic news makes me think I couldn’t come up with a list better than the one we hear from Peter Falk’s “Grandpa”: It has “fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles . . . .” Not so much with the monsters, but everything else fits perfectly. If I didn’t have family coming and last-minute Christmas duties and a new reading list to start in two weeks, I’d start reading Arcadia all over again right now. Maybe instead, I should go watch The Princess Bride.

It’s All Good

In my master Plan, I have written for year 9, “Richard Baxter: Dr. Johnson says all of it is good.” With that kind of recommendation from one of my heroes, I just had to read something by Baxter. At some point I discovered the title Practical Works. But at some later point (I don’t remember when or where), I must have learned that Practical Works is quite long (I’m looking at an offer right now on logos.com for an edition in 23 volumes), and I must have found a further recommendation or some intriguing information about an excerpt because my Plan then says, “Just read chapter 3.” 

At the beginning of this year, I gave myself a week for this chapter, called ““General Grand Directions for Walking with God,” thinking that I’d get ahead five or six days. Little did I know that the single chapter was as long as a book: about 300 pages! I had a schedule to keep and not much wiggle room this close to the end of the year, so I confess I had to skim the chapter. Fortunately, Baxter wrote this chapter in something like outline form, making it very easy to skim while making sure that I missed none of the key points.

The chapter contains seventeen “Grand Directions,” each of which has a number of sub-directions and other lists of subordinate points. Some tell the reader to “strive” or to “labour” to do some given thing, but most came in a form directing the reader to consider or understand or study some aspect of God’s character or of his relationship with us. Really following these directions instead of just reading (or skimming!) them properly needs some quiet and some time for meditation. For these times, there should be a zeroth direction: Strive to set aside adequate time for meditating on these directions. 

Consider some examples:

• Grand Direction IV: “Let it be your chiefest study to attain to a true, orderly, and practical knowledge of God, in his several attributes and relations; and to find a due impression from each of them upon your hearts, and a distinct, effectual improvement of them in your lives.”  

• Grand Direction V: “Remember that God is your Lord, or Owner: and see that you make an absolute resignation of yourselves, and all that you have, to him as his own.”

• Grand Direction VII: “Continue as the covenanted scholars of Christ, the Prophet and Teacher of his church, to learn of him, by his Spirit, word, and ministers, the farther knowledge of God.”

• Grand Direction X: “Your lives must be laid out in doing God service, and doing all the good you can, . . . remembering that you are engaged to God, as servants to their Lord and master.”

• Grand Direction XI: “Let it be most deeply engraven in thy heart, that God is infinitely good, and amiable.”  I especially like this sub-direction: “The great means of promoting love to God is duly to behold him in his appearances to man, in the ways of Nature, Grace, and Glory.”

• Grand Direction XII: “Trust God . . . ; and quiet thy mind in his love and faithfulness, whatever shall appear unto thee, or befall thee in the world.”

• Grand Direction XIII: “Diligently labor that God and Holiness may be thy chief delight.”

And the most poetically phrased of the Grand Directions:

• Grand Direction XVI: “Let you life on earth be a conversation in heaven, by the constant work of faith and love: even such a faith as maketh things future as now present, and the unseen world as if it were continually open to your sight.”

It’s too bad I had to skim the chapter; as Dr. Johnson said, it was all good. Reading it straight through over several days wouldn’t have been right, either, though. I think the chapter should be read one direction per day for as long as that takes. There. There’s my direction for you.

Trollope Comes Through Again

Last year, I wrote here that I couldn’t figure out which was the central plot of Anthony Trollope’s The American Senator, and that the title didn’t point the way since the Senator’s story was at most the C plot. This year, I read Trollope’s Mr Scarborough’s Family, and, although a large number of subplots weave their way through the fabric of the book, the story of the manipulative Mr Scarborough and his will and his two problematic sons is clearly at the center. It isn’t the last story touched upon, though. Trollope knew his main audience consisted of housewives and teenage girls, and he put in a love story, as well. According to his usual plan, he announces in the first few chapters who “is to be our hero” and who “is to be our heroine.” So we know right up front who is going to get married at the end of the book, and yet it’s still a fun ride getting the lovebirds to their nuptial bliss.

Before the age of the psychological novel and stream-of-consciousness narration, Trollope loves to give his readers insight into his characters’ thinking. Augustus Scarborough (son number 2) hardly does anything in the book without two or three secret motives. I have to admit to you, I often find myself saying, with regard to certain people who continue to cause me grief every few months, “Why did they do this? I have know idea what’s going on in their heads! I guess I’m glad I don’t understand how they think.” But somehow Trollope does understand (at least as far as I know) how young girls in love think, how lawyers think, how ashamed gambling addicts think. And he has to use an omniscient narrator to get into their minds, because almost no character in a Trollope book just says straight out what he or she is thinking. It’s even more seldom that a character says what he’s feeling. Even when they don’t have hidden agendas, these characters have to deal with Victorian standards of proper speech. Poor Mr Prosper once actually blurts out exactly what he thinks in a moment of frustration, in front of his vicar no less, and then spends a long time apologizing for the breach. And it’s all fascinating to me, this translation of thought to the language of acceptable intercourse. Of course, some personages of low character show their baseness precisely by expressing their thoughts directly, but in a Trollope novel, these people are usually mere plot devices and not characters with story arcs.

As far as characters with story arcs go, Mr Scarborough’s Family has quite a list of good ones. Mr Scarborough senior, who believes he knows morality better than the established law, goes to great, deceptive lengths to work around the law and do exactly what he sees to be right, even if he has to lie to and about his sons. Mountjoy Scarborough, son number 1, has a gambling problem but tries to kick it and believes he will have the strength to do it if he can only get Florence to marry him. Alas! Mountjoy is not Trollope’s designated hero, and Florence is the designated heroine, so we’re left at the end of the book not knowing if Mountjoy will find any actually available remedy for his problem, but we hope that he will. Harry Annesley is the designated hero. He and Florence aren’t very developed even by the usual standards of Trollope’s love-interest characters – until the last chapter, when we find that their married life is full of playful wit and good-natured acceptance of less than perfection. I wish Trollope had shared more of this humorous side of these two characters earlier. The public unjustly vilifies Harry for an action he commits right at the beginning of the book (we learn about his secret motives for not talking to defend himself), and his uncle, Mr Prosper, who has told Harry for years that he will inherit the Buston estate, decides he can’t possibly leave an estate to a man with a bad reputation and determines to disinherit him by finally marrying at 50 and having a son. His impractical plan (what woman of child-bearing age is he going to find?), his thoughts about how to choose a woman, the winner in Mr Prosper’s process (the delightfully named Matilda Thoroughbung), and their marriage negotiations are all amazing and hilarious. Then there’s Mr Prosper’s valet, who runs the house and Mr Prosper. And there’s Mr Grey, the lawyer, and his unmarried daughter, who doesn’t want to get married because she would miss her late-night discussions with her father about the law. I could go on. OK, OK, one more detail! Mr Prosper says he can’t possibly travel from Buston to Cheltanham. The trains don’t connect the two places directly, so he’ll have to go to London and and travel from one station to another, and, he asks, “What will I do in London for an hour and a quarter?” That’s the kind of detail that makes you love a man in a book that you might only get annoyed with in real life. But Trollope and authors like him teach us that we should love the real person and all his annoying foibles with all the forgiveness and even enjoyment that we afford the fictional character. 

I could also go on about the way Trollope compares views of marriage (as he kept in mind those teenage girls reading the book, marriage for love wins out, of course), distinguishes between legality and morality, explores many kinds of reactions by several characters when they find that they can’t force others to think and act the way they want, defends women’s social agency, and sympathizes with young and old, rich and poor, gentry and commoner. But I’ll just end by sharing one fun detail. As a clerk in the Royal Post Office, Trollope invented the public mailbox on the street. Even if you’ve never read one of his books or even heard of him, you’ve used Anthony Trollope’s gift to civilization many times. Many people write back and forth to each other in this book, and Trollope makes sure to mention on one occasion that the epistler deposited her message in the “letter pillar.”

Anthony Trollope wrote a lot of novels, so there’s a lot to get through. But I’m going to put this one on my list of books to reread someday.