Doctor Wortle's School

Doctor Wortle's School is a novel by English novelist Anthony Trollope, first published in 1881. Set in the fictional parish of Bowick in Victorian England, it tells the story of Doctor Wortle who runs a Christian academy, and who hires Mr. and Mrs. Peacocke, a respectable English scholar and an American woman. Believing that her first husband (an abusive drunk) had been killed in the Civil War, Mrs. Peacocke is shocked to discover that he is in fact alive, making her current marriage an improper one. However, she and her second husband continue to live together, causing scandal amongst those in the community who see intentional bigamy as a sin. The novel explores the ways in which Dr. Wortle navigates the situation as he attempts to rebuild his own repuation and prove that he was in the right for hiring the Peacockes.