The Widow Barnaby was published by Richard Bentley in 1839 and introduces one of Trollope’s most vivid creations: Martha Barnaby, a vulgar, ambitious, physically imposing widow who sets out to catch a rich second husband through a campaign of social climbing, calculated flirtation, and shameless self-promotion. The novel follows her matrimonial adventures from provincial Bristol through the fashionable watering places of Cheltenham and Clifton to London society.
The Widow Barnaby is a magnificent comic creation — brassy, energetic, indestructible, and completely without self-awareness. She deploys a full arsenal of husband-hunting strategies (low-cut gowns, heavy flattery, strategic fainting, ostentatious piety) and is defeated again and again by her own vulgarity and by the social barriers that separate genuine gentility from its imitation. Trollope’s comedy is both broad (the widow’s physical absurdity, her malapropisms, her grotesque courtship tactics) and subtle (the novel is a precise analysis of how class operates through manners, and how the aspiring can never quite master the codes of those above them).
The novel was popular enough to generate two sequels — The Widow Married (1840) and The Barnabys in America (1843), which takes the widow to the United States, allowing Trollope to revisit her American material in fictional form. Mrs. Barnaby is sometimes compared to Thackeray’s Becky Sharp (from Vanity Fair, 1848), and there is reason to think Thackeray knew and admired the earlier creation.
Collecting The Widow Barnaby
First edition (Richard Bentley, London, 1839): Three volumes, cloth boards.
Market values:
- First edition (3 vols): $200–$500
- Later Victorian reprints: $30–$75