The Claverings

Anthony Trollope's The Claverings (1867) is one of his most artfully constructed novels — a tight, self-contained study of a likeable, ordinary, weak young man caught between the steady love he has chosen and the dazzling one he cannot give up. Serialised in the Cornhill Magazine in 1866–67, it stands apart from Trollope's great Barsetshire and Palliser series and makes a perfect first introduction to his art.

Harry Clavering has been jilted. Julia Brabazon, the woman he loved, has thrown him over to make a brilliant marriage to the wealthy, debauched Lord Ongar. Stung, Harry trains as a civil engineer and becomes engaged to Florence Burton — sensible, loving, and undazzling, everything Julia was not. Then Lord Ongar dies, and Julia returns a rich, titled, lonely widow, trailing scandal and ready to take back the man she once cast aside. And Harry, engaged and honour-bound, finds that he simply cannot say no.

Around this central wavering Trollope builds a rich social comedy — cold Sir Hugh Clavering, the predatory schemers Sophie Gordeloup and Count Pateroff, the immortal Captain Boodle with his stable-yard wisdom about courtship. But the engine of the book is always Harry's divided heart. With merciless patience and unfailing sympathy, Trollope paints weakness not as melodrama but as an ordinary human condition: the man who knows the right and cannot do it, and the real cost his dithering exacts on everyone around him. It is moral realism of the highest order — clear-eyed about the failing, humane toward the man.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1867 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.