Harry Clavering is the only son of Reverend Henry Clavering, a well-to-do clergyman and the paternal uncle of the affluent baronet Sir Hugh Clavering. At the novel's beginning, Harry is jilted by his fiancee, the sister of Sir Hugh's wife, who proceeds to marry Lord Ongar, a wealthy but debauched earl. Harry's father urges him to make the church his profession; but Harry aspires to become a civil engineer, of the type of Robert Stephenson, Joseph Locke, and Thomas Brassey. To this end, he becomes a pupil at the firm of Beilby and Burton. A year and a half later, Harry has become engaged to...

Clara Amedroz is the only surviving child of the elderly squire of Belton Castle in Somersetshire. At twenty-five, she is old for an unmarried woman. Her father's income and savings have been dissipated to pay for the extravagances of her brother, who subsequently committed suicide. Since her father has no living sons, his estate, which is entailed, will pass upon his death to a distant cousin, Will Belton. Despite her poor prospects, she has two eligible suitors. Within four days of making her acquaintance, Will Belton proposes marriage to her. Belton is warm-hearted, kind, and generous, and...

John Munroe Bell had been a lawyer in Albany, State of New York, and as such had thriven well. He had thriven well as long as thrift and thriving on this earth had been allowed to him. But the Almighty had seen fit to shorten his span. Early in life he had married a timid, anxious, pretty, good little wife, whose whole heart and mind had been given up to do his bidding and deserve his love. She had not only deserved it but had possessed it, and as long as John Munroe Bell had lived, Henrietta Bell--Hetta as he called her--had been a woman rich in blessings. After twelve years of such...

The Plot Mrs. Thompson, widow of an English civil servant in India, had placed her older daughter Lilian in a boarding school in Le Puy, and with her younger child Mimmy went there to he near her. At their hotel was a courteous and sympathetic Frenchman, M. Lacordaire, whom she took to he the local banker, and whom she came to love. On a sight-seeing trip to the Chateau of Prince Polignac he asked her to marry him, explaining that he was the village tailor, and although she was distressed at his lack of position, she accepted him.

The novel takes place in the respectable, fictional parish of Bowick, Victorian England, with the main plot concerning itself with the renowned Dr. Wortle's Christian seminary academy. The community's morals are outraged and the school's credibility wounded upon the discovery that Mr. and Mrs. Peacocke, a respectable English scholar and an American woman, hired to the academy by Wortle, are indeed improperly married. Their wedlock was rendered asunder by their chance meeting, some years prior, of Mrs. Peacocke's first husband, an abusive drunkard named Colonel Ferdinand Lefroy. Hearing that...

After taking his degree at Cambridge, John Caldigate found himself, in consequence of certain amusements at Newmarket and elsewhere, heavily indebted to a moneylender, Davis, and with no means to meet his obligation. His father Daniel Caldigate, disgusted with his extravagance and folly, arranged through his banker friend Nicholas Bolton for the sale by his son of the reversion of the estate and for a mortgage to clear his debts. At Mr. Bolton's home where John went to sign the papers, he met, briefly, Bolton's young daughter Hester, and fell in love with her. With his college friend Dick...

A young Englishman, Harry Heathcote, had leased 120,000 acres of bush from the Australian government, on which he ran 30,000 sheep. With him at Gangoil lived his wife, two small sons and his sister-in-law Kate Daly. Giles Medlicot was his nearest neighbor, but the two men had not become friends. Medlicot had purchased land that lay between Gangoil and the river for a sugar plantation and had erected a sugar-mill. The loss of the river frontage was a serious matter to Heathcote and he considered its acquisition by his neighbor a personal affront. This was the more unfortunate as Kate Daly and...

Trollope said he wrote The Golden Lion of Granpere 'on the model of Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel', and thought it inferior to them and Sir Harry Hotspur. The Golden Lion lacks the tragic intensity of Sir Harry Hotspur. The hero of the latter is an older man who has just lost his only son, the heir to his property. Sir Harry longs to gratify the romantic dreams of Emily, the only child he has left, when Emily is attracted to Sir George Hotspur. Sir George is now Sir Harry's heir, and he would keep the property and family name together. But Sir Harry has been told George is self-seeking and...

The story deals with the two friends Harry Norman and Alaric Tudor, who work at the Weights and Measures Office, and with Alaric's cousin Charley, who works in Internal Navigation. Harry falls in love with Gertrude Woodward, the eldest of the three beautiful daughters of a clergyman's widow, while Alaric pursues Linda, the second daughter. Gertrude rejects Harry's marriage proposal, and Alaric, rising in the ranks of the civil service, pursues and gains Gertrude's hand. Harry is unable to forgive Alaric, but eventually he marries the second daughter, Linda, and later becomes a country squire....