Where to start with Trollope?

[WallabyWay]

I'm trying to read The Warden and I'm really struggling with it. I find it rather tedious. Are there better Trollope books to start with?

TIA

Would recommend The Vicar of Bullhampton, Framley Parsonage, and Can You Forgive Her?.

Avoid Miss Mackenzie!

One of my very favourite non-series Trollopes is Ayala’s Angel.

I must read/re-read some Trollope. I read all the Barchester novels ages ago and TWWLN but never managed to get going on the Palliser novels. HKHWR - I know I read it, but I can remember nothing about it. Hmm.

I like Trollope, but I have to say I prefer Dickens. I read a fascinating biography of Thackeray's daughter, Anne Thackeray Ritchie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Isabella_Thackeray_Ritchie). She met just about everybody who was anybody in Literary London from around the middle of the 19th century to well into the 20th century. She was related to a quite a few of them, including Virginia Woolf. It was obvious that the Thackerays and the Trollopes thought Dickens was several rungs below them on the social ladder - then there would have been professional jealousy at his meteoric success, and horror and snobbishness at his self-promotion and enormous ego - and then, actually entirely justifiably, they were all horrified by the way he treated his wife. I've read quite a bit about Dickens and I don't think I would have got on with him very well as a person, but my god that man could write. The opening of Bleak House is one of the best things I've ever read.

@diningiswest

Just remembered another Trollope factoid.

I think it's in Can Hou Forgive Her, where a suitor posts a letter in London to the heroine, late on Christmas Eve, and it arrives on Christmas morning at the country house where she is staying!

Of course Trollope was head of the Post Office, so he could have just put it in for effect!

Interested as am about to start Dr Thorne. I may report back.

Invented the pillar box, I believe.

Going by the many references in 19th and early 20th century novels I've read, the post used to be phenomenally quick. You could post something in London in the morning and it would be delivered on the same day. There were three or four deliveries a day, I think, in the cities, anyway. The arrival of the telephone and telegram must have reduced the number of letters posted.

if you can find it, watch the BBC adaptation of The Pallisers in 25 episodes. It’s still excellent.