The American Senator

Anthony Trollope's The American Senator (1877) is one of the sharpest of his later novels — a comedy of English country life that doubles as a study of ambition, custom, and the marriage market, set in and around the small county town of Dillsborough.

Into this thoroughly English world of squires, farmers, and hunting men comes Elias Gotobed, a senator from the American state of Mickewa, a blunt and relentlessly logical visitor who cannot stop asking why. Why should a man inherit land he has done nothing to earn? Why should a clergyman's living be bought and sold? Why should a fox be preserved at the farmer's expense so gentlemen may ride after it? Through his letters home and his climactic lecture, 'The Irrationality of Englishmen,' Trollope arraigns the absurdities of English custom — while letting the English answer, again and again, that their system is to be valued because it is picturesque rather than logical.

But the figure who dominates the book is not the senator. It is Arabella Trefoil — beautiful, thirty, and worn down by years on the marriage market — who, engaged to the decent John Morton, scents larger game and sets about trapping the rich Lord Rufford instead. Her cold, exhausting campaign is among the most psychologically acute things Trollope ever wrote, drawn with a clear-eyed pity that deepens the unsparing portrait. Around both runs the dense, particular world of an English hunting county, and a gentler courtship that throws Arabella's ruthlessness into sharp relief.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1877 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.