In the Library
Phineas Finn
Anthony Trollope, 1869
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 19 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 76
- Length
- Length 260k words
£1.99
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There is nothing on earth that I’m so much afraid of in a young member of Parliament as convictions.
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The Red and the Black
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Another poor, handsome young provincial climbing on charm alone, but Stendhal lets his hero calculate where Trollope lets his stay decent.
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About the book
Members of Parliament were paid nothing at all in those years, which meant the House of Commons belonged to men with land behind them. The joke this novel opens on is that its hero has none of that: an Irish country doctor's son, twenty-four, charming, asked half in jest whether he would care to stand for the borough of Loughshane, who says yes and is inside within the year. Trollope stood for Parliament himself and was beaten, and he knew the place the way you know a room you were refused, so he gets the machinery exactly right. The material is not speeches but whips and lobbies and favours, dinners where governments are unmade over the fish, and always the arithmetic of a life that pays nothing. The ache of it is that Phineas is genuinely good. Every door in London opens for him, and Phineas Finn is patient enough to show you precisely what it costs to walk back out through one.