Phineas Redux

Anthony Trollope's Phineas Redux (1873) is the fourth of the six Palliser novels and a direct sequel to Phineas Finn — at once a political novel, a love story, and, astonishingly, a courtroom thriller, written at the height of Trollope's powers.

Years after he gave up office for principle and retreated to Ireland, Phineas Finn is a widower, restless, and drawn back across the sea by the old lure of English public life. He wins a seat and re-enters Parliament, only to find the world meaner than he remembered — and to make a bitter enemy of the place-hunting Mr. Bonteen. When the two quarrel publicly at their club, and Bonteen is found murdered that same night in a quiet London street, Phineas is arrested and put on trial for his life at the Old Bailey.

Public opinion turns savagely against him; the very charm that once carried him is read now as the smoothness of a killer. His acquittal owes less to the law than to the tireless devotion of the rich, worldly widow Madame Max Goesler, whose hand he had once refused and who now travels abroad to run down the evidence that will clear him. With Mr. Daubeny's cynical politics, the scandal of Lizzie Eustace, and the tragedy of Lady Laura running alongside, and the Pallisers moving in the background, this is the darkest and most gripping of Trollope's parliamentary novels.

Told in the most companionable narrator's voice in English fiction, Phineas Redux is a searching study of public reputation, of justice and the mob, of disillusion with politics — and of the one loyalty that holds firm when the whole town has decided a good man is guilty.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1873 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.