The Prime Minister

Anthony Trollope's The Prime Minister (1876) is the fifth of the six Palliser novels, and the climactic political novel of the cycle — Trollope's fullest study of power, integrity, and a marriage under strain, written at the height of his fame.

Plantagenet Palliser, the conscientious, proud, austerely honourable Duke of Omnium, is asked to form a government — a fragile Coalition held together by nothing but the want of an alternative — and reaches at last the summit he has climbed toward all his life. He finds it agony. The very scruple and honesty that make him a good man unfit him for the compromises and intrigues of office, and he broods over every slight while his brilliant, restless wife, Lady Glencora, throws herself into the role of grand political hostess — spending recklessly, meddling in patronage, and slowly undermining the dignity her husband prizes above all.

Braided against this is the tragedy of Ferdinand Lopez, a plausible City adventurer of obscure origins who marries the gentle, loyal Emily Wharton against her father's bitter objection and over the devoted suit of Arthur Fletcher — and drags her, and her family's fortune, down with him as his speculations collapse. His humiliation, contrived through Glencora's careless interference, ties the two stories fatally together, and his end is one of the most shocking in Victorian fiction.

Told in the most companionable narrator's voice in English fiction, The Prime Minister sets the true gentleman against the false, the public tragedy of office against the private tragedy of a marriage, and asks — soberly, without easy answers — whether a genuinely good man can hold power, and what it costs him if he does.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1876 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.