We are nearly two centuries removed from the popular Victorian novels of Charles Dickens, William M. Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot and Henry James.

Works by these prominent writers can still be found on bookstore shelves today and are treasured by many private collectors. Keen readers often return to these books, in part because they provided such rich reading experiences and in part as a welcome relief from the darkness and increasingly negative subject matter of many present-day novels.

In my student years I spent a lot of time reading the Victorian novelists and trying to understand how a well-written, realistic novel works its magic on readers. For some reason I shied away from Trollope in those days, daunted perhaps by his amazing output of 47 novels during his lifetime (1815-82).

Since that long-gone time, I have read several of his books, including “The Warden” (1855), “Barchester Towers” (1857), and “The Way We Live Now” (1875). But this summer with my Nova Scotia book club I read and came to admire Trollope’s “Can You Forgive Her?” (1865). The first novel in his Palliser series of six interrelated books, it was a particular favourite of our club’s readers.

Trollope himself liked it as well. Indeed, one of the book group declared after our summer meeting that she was going to reread the entire Palliser series this coming winter.

I would be remiss if I didn’t admit to having my own struggles in reading this long, serialized novel. It was written for a popular monthly magazine, “The Cornhill,” and appeared in something like 18 parts in 1864-65. Inevitably there is much repetition involved and (shall I call it) a good deal of sidewinding or meandering in its presentation; in fact, one senses an implicitly cordial relationship between author and his readers over the course of the complete serialization.

That “cordiality” belongs to the Victorian........

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