He was alone in the world, and
there was no one of whom he could ask a question.After the sudden death of his
wife, two years after he has left office as Prime Minister, the Duke of Omnium
must become deeply involved with his children for the first time. They vex him
enormously: with school expulsions, vast gambling debts, and what he considers
to be calamitous romantic attachments. He tries to compel them to do what he
wants, but they are not so easy to manage.Even when his eldest child and
heir, Lord Silverbridge, makes him proud by embarking upon a political career,
the Duke grapples with heartache. For Silverbridge becomes a Conservative
rather than a Liberal, flouting the family tradition. The relationship between
father and son is drawn with remarkable subtlety, and the book as a whole
becomes a piercing, yet often humorous, exploration of change: how both the
young and the old resist, tolerate, or embrace it.Trollope cut roughly 65,000
words, at a vulnerable moment in his career, to get the novel published, but
concluded rapidly that he had made a grievous error. After a painstaking
reconstruction by a team of researchers, The Duke's Children, the final book in
Trollope's famed Palliser series, can now be read the way he first intended. It
is a masterpiece of Victorian fiction.
