The Politics of Public Opinion in the Novels of Anthony Trollope: A 'Tenth Muse' [Paperback]

Although public opinion has always existed, it becomes an acknowledged political subject in both the Oxford English Dictionary (1864) and theBarsetshire ChronicleandParliamentary Novelsof Anthony Trollope contemporaneously with 1) the penetration of the press into local issues and 2) the entire question of which publics were to be represented. Public opinion hence is a composite of parliamentary law-making as well as a kind of appellate division for societys social (and judicial judgments), providing an alternative narrative. It differs from gossip in the nineteenth-century novel insofar as it contains no instruction manual (dont tell anyone, who told you but...), but can be manipulated by a variety of new informational platforms to not merely impact, but constitute decision-making. Detached from any unitary authority and often anonymously narrated, public opinion, like the orphan-figure of nineteenth-century literature, is a discourse discontinuous from history, tradition, class alignments, and foundational origins to become a law unto itself.

??The figurative body of public opinion presents challenges to readers of the nineteenth-century British fiction insofar as it lacks the markers of an autonomoussubject. It replaces direct address with intimations of surveillance and interpellation, reading characters and their actions as we read it for our situationally within it. In the novels of Anthony Trollope who continually refers to avox populi, public opinion has an economy, as a kind of currency in which reputation is priced and marketed while itself seeming inconclusive and undeveloped, even among its self-appointed spokesmen.

It takes its place among a number of institutions that knit the country together as a network of conveyances with different points of entry: roads, railroads, ports and canals and the post office in which Trollope served as a civil servant for over 30 years. One such instituti