'The Duke's Children' by the seemingly inexhaustible Anthony Trollope. The final novel of Trollope's six novels about the aristocratic Palliser family, and Trollope's penultimate novel. It was originally published in monthly instalments in the magazine 'All the Year Round' - a common procedure in the 19th century, which did allow for a wider readership. When published in book form in May 1880 by Chapman & Hall, it was as 3 volumes. I have decided to follow that pattern, giving me time between volumes to complete the other three novels I have on the go.
As with the Barchester Chronicles I came to 'The Duke's Children' through one of those BBC adaptations which sadly seem so thin on the ground these days. Not that I remember the original broadcast of the early 1970s, but the repeat sometime about a decade ago on BBC2 of a weekday afternoon. And a treat it was. Some 26 episodes in all, the work of the thoroughly scurrilous writer, the priapic Simon Raven. A man worthy of a blogpost all to himself.
However, my trip to London, to see the current Richard Dadd exhibition at the RA, in the last couple of days has put a spanner in the works, for instead of taking the 'The Duke's Children' (a hard back edition by the Folio Society, which has an eloquent forward by the politician Roy Jenkins) with me, I decided to buy a vintage Penguin paperback from Skoob Books in Bloomsbury. I plumped for 'The Waterfall' by Margaret Drabble, one of her novels that give the lie to the 'show don't tell' school of literature. So now I have five books on the go. So much for my good intentions.
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