The Duke's Children

Anthony Trollope's The Duke's Children (1880) is the sixth and last of the six Palliser novels, the close of one of the great achievements in English fiction — a tender, unhurried study of a grieving father, generational change, and the hardest of all lessons: letting go.

The Duchess is dead. Lady Glencora — the warm, reckless heart of the whole series — is gone, and her husband, the austere and scrupulous Duke of Omnium, lately Prime Minister, is left more alone than he has ever been: his government fallen, his public life in abeyance, and three grown children he has always loved at a careful distance and never really known.

Each of them wants what he never planned. His heir, Lord Silverbridge, stands for Parliament against his father's party and then loses his heart to Isabel Boncassen, a brilliant, frank American with neither blood nor rank. His daughter, Lady Mary, will not give up Frank Tregear — a gentleman of good family but no fortune — and cannot be moved or bought off. The drama of the novel is the long, patient, often painful contest between a proud father's idea of what his children owe their name and the children's insistence on choosing for themselves.

Written near the end of Trollope's life, The Duke's Children turns the matchless Plantagenet Palliser — stripped of his wife and his office — into one of the most moving figures in Victorian fiction: a good man who must learn, slowly and at real cost to his pride, that his love is worth more than his being right. It is the perfect, autumnal close to the Palliser saga.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1879 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.