Dr. Wortle's School

Anthony Trollope's Dr. Wortle's School (1881) is one of the most admired of his short late novels — a swift, morally vivid tale, written in twenty-two days when its author was past sixty, about the courage it takes to defy the crowd. Dr. Jeffrey Wortle is the rector of Bowick and master of a thriving preparatory school: strong-willed, generous, and autocratic, a man who likes to be master and always is. To strengthen the school he engages an admirable assistant, the scholarly Mr. Henry Peacocke, who arrives with his quiet, dignified American wife. They are everything the Doctor could wish — until their secret breaks.

Years before, in Missouri, Mr. Peacocke had married a deserted woman whose brutal first husband, Colonel Ferdinand Lefroy, was reported dead. Soon afterward Lefroy reappeared, alive, then vanished again — leaving the Peacockes married in good faith, deeply attached, morally blameless, and yet, in the eye of the law, not married at all. When the truth comes out, the world is outraged: the bishop is uneasy, the clergy are scandalised, the newspapers scent a story, anxious parents threaten to withdraw their sons. And Dr. Wortle, to everyone's astonishment, plants himself squarely on the side of the Peacockes, staking his school and his standing on their innocence.

A moral-test novel of unusual directness, Dr. Wortle's School watches how every character — bishop, rival clergyman, gossiping county, nervous parent — meets a single sharp ethical question, and sets against them the blunt, headstrong decency of a proud, exasperating, wholly convincing good man. It is a meditation on the gap between the letter and the spirit of the law, on the cruelty of respectable opinion, and on what we owe to people we know to be good when the world has decided to condemn them — lightened throughout by the gentle courtship of the Doctor's daughter Mary and young Lord Carstairs.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1881 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.