The Duke’s Children was serialized in All the Year Round from 1879 to 1880 and published in book form by Chapman & Hall in 1880. Lady Glencora is dead — she dies offstage before the novel begins — and the Duke is devastated. Without Glencora’s energy, warmth, and social intelligence, Palliser is lost. He retreats into the rigid propriety that has always been his armor and attempts to control his three children with the same stern rationality he brought to politics.
All three children rebel. Lord Silverbridge, the eldest, has been sent down from Oxford, has joined the Conservatives (his father’s political opponents), and wants to marry Isabel Boncassen, an American — brilliant, beautiful, and utterly unsuitable by the Duke’s standards. Lady Mary has fallen in love with Frank Tregear, a gentleman without money — exactly the kind of imprudent match that Glencora herself made decades ago. Lord Gerald, the youngest, is in debt and in trouble. The Duke, who loves his children deeply but cannot express his love in any form they recognize, watches his authority crumble.
Trollope’s sympathy is divided. The Duke is not wrong that his children are making risky choices — Tregear has no money, Isabel is a foreigner, Silverbridge is reckless. But the children are not wrong that their father’s rigidity is suffocating, and that his standards of suitability reflect class prejudice more than wisdom. The novel’s emotional resolution — the Duke’s gradual, painful acceptance of each child’s choice — is earned through hundreds of pages of negotiation, argument, and silent suffering.
The novel’s political subplot, in which Silverbridge’s switch to the Conservatives represents a generational shift in English politics, adds texture but is subordinate to the domestic story. Trollope understood that the political and the personal are inseparable — that the Duke’s inability to accept an American daughter-in-law reflects the same inflexibility that made him an unsuccessful Prime Minister.
Collecting The Duke’s Children
First edition (Chapman & Hall, London, 1880): Three volumes, cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, three volumes, fine: $2,000–$6,000
- Very good: $800–$2,000