The American Senator

If you're looking for a book about Americans who happen to be Senators, you could be excused for thinking you had hit the jackpot here. Despite the title, though, the American Senator is but a minor (though wonderfully bombastic) character in this book about life in the English country.

There are many other larger characters, including the scheming Arabella Trefoil, who is desperate to ensnare a husband and who almost succeeds in capturing the witless Lord Rufford. All Lord Rufford wants to do is to hunt foxes, and he almost ends up married to a woman he barely knows or likes! A little kiss in the back of a carriage, and the next thing you know a massive letter writing campaign is embarked upon to marry you off. It was clearly a difficult time to be a man back then.

Even worse for poor Lord Rufford, at one point, a fellow hunter falls off a horse and lays near death in Rufford's house on the very night a ball is to be held there! After much hemming and hawing, it is decided to have the ball anyway, on the utterly sensible premise that, "Though the man were to die why shouldn't the people dance?"

And then there's this passage:

And nobody in that house really cared much for Caneback [the man who was dying]. He was not a man worthy of much care. . . .  he had loved no one particularly, had been dear to no one in these latter days of his life, had been of very little use in the world, and had done very little more for society than any other horse-trainer! But nevertheless it is a bore when a gentleman dies in your house.

And indeed it is a bore. It's the sort of thing that can put a damper on your entire day. I was reading much of this while reading "War and Peace," which was great because Tolstoy would have long passages describing ghastly battle scenes. Meanwhile, Trollope would have long sections about party etiquette. It was a wonderful contrast. Trollope has become my bedtime reading of choice. His books are an entertaining and frivolous way to end that day, and I mean that in the best possible way.

And here's just one more quote to conclude this, because I love quoting Trollope. This is what one character says to her stepdaughter who just turned down a marriage proposal:

You are an idiot . . . an ungrateful idiot; and unless you think better of it, you'll repent your folly to your dying day. Who do you think is to come running after a moping slut like you?

So far, this has to be the classiest insult I have ever read with the word "slut" in it. Granted, it mainly meant "an untidy person" back then, but Trollope's characters clearly knew how to tell somebody off.