TROLLOPE FOLIO SOCIETY SERIAL
“There is no concrete evidence for who exactly forced him to make the cuts, though it seems probable that it was Charles Dickens Jr who requested a shorter book for serial publication,” said Whitlock Blundell.
Whitlock Blundell speculates that Trollope “would have been incandescent” over being asked to make the cuts the precise reason for them is “lost to posterity”, says the Folio Society, but “is likely to have been a demand from his publishers on the grounds of economy”. “He found that one of the easiest places to make cuts because it didn’t interrupt the flow, but it means lots of ironic commentary was missing – and he’s all about the irony.” “I hadn’t realised until looking in both versions how much ironic commentary Trollope often reserved for the ends of his chapters,” said Whitlock Blundell.
“The restored version has many more humorous touches and also has a darker edge,” writes Amarnick, adding that “the cuts diminish all his characters – often softening some of their harder edges”. Although Trollope did not delete any of his 80 chapters, he removed consecutive paragraphs in some places in others, he cut sentences, phrases and words, even replacing a word with one which was slightly shorter on some occasions. But in the restored version, the characters of the children come through far more sympathetically.”Īmarnick writes in a commentary to the new edition that the “thousands of cuts did tremendous damage” to the work. “When I first read The Duke’s Children 30 years ago, it all seemed to be focused on the Duke’s reactions. “It’s quite extraordinary the different cumulative effect it has, on the richness of the text and the subtlety of the characters,” said Joe Whitlock Blundell at the Folio Society. The Duke’s Children sees former prime minister of England and the Duke of Omnium Plantagenet Palliser widowed, and struggling to adapt to life without his wife and to support his three adult children.
Now a complete, unabridged text is set to be published for the first time by the Folio Society to mark 200 years since the birth of a writer who once thundered, when asked to shorten Barchester Towers, that “no consideration should induce me to cut out a third of my work”.
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