Roger Scatcherd

I am enjoying Doctor Thorne more than Barchester Towers or The Warden. It seems to operate a bit more in the area of books like Bleak House, North and South, and Middlemarch. It was a time when self-made men made reputations for themselves by their feats of engineering; thus alarming their betters. I read a non-fiction book called Iron Men about some of the greatest engineers from the Industrial Revolution. Not all of them, but a bigger proportion of them were men with little education, who just had the drive and the raw ability to succeed. They did not go to university. They did not know any Latin. Some were barely literate. Roger Scratcherd sounded like one of those men, only more in the civil engineering than metal bashing line. When the book described Roger Scracherd's being asked by parliament to taken on difficult projects, I was reminded of George Stephenson, who designed the first passenger train. He was barely literate.

It was Trollope's favourite. It does not have the broad comic aspect of Barchester Towers and sets the tone for his following novels.

There's a splendid older, single, wealthy woman whose name I can't remember.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jackson Richardson

It was Trollope's favourite. It does not have the broad comic aspect of Barchester Towers and sets the tone for his following novels.

There's a splendid older, single, wealthy woman whose name I can't remember.

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Miss Dunstable.

Apparently the most popular of Trollope's novels during his lifetime. But it lacks the slightly grotesque caricature of Barchester Towers.

I found something a bit unpleasant about the story in the end. Introducing a character just so he can die young and leave a lot of money to the heroine is not a particularly pleasant plot device. Sir Louis Scatcherd was horrible, so I suppose it was alright. I wondered how likely it was for an alcoholic to die under twenty-five. It usually takes a fair bit longer than that. Maybe if Trollope was writing nowadays, he'd kill him off with hard drugs, although I don't suppose he'd write books like that nowadays. It is not as if I have a lot of sympathy with the Greshams and their financial problems anyway. Squire Gresham inherits a huge estate and compromises it, partly with his wife's help. Roger Scratcherd was a self-made man. Why should I be glad that the Scratcherd fortune pays off the Gresham debts? They bled us white, the Gresham squires and their like. Us and our fathers' fathers, and our fathers' fathers' fathers; etc. It's not even as if I like Frank Gresham. He was just an entitled thug. I bet he was putting it about in all the fleshpots around the Mediterranean, while he was supposedly pining for Mary.