Dickens very much likes to show us as puppets in life's grand theatre, but he rarely shows us the strings or who's pulling them. Oh, the poverty, what a tragedy! Oh, the workhouses, what a disgrace! Well, somebody put the children in them, Charlie. Trollope, on the other hand, starts with politics and works his way down to show how it infects everything. Put another way: Trollope knows how life works. Maybe you needed to come from the colonies where you never grew up with the luxury of separating politics from everything. But how's this for irony: he despised Jamaica.
M. James, The Disappearers (2026), 475
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