Trollope, Orley Farm, and Dickens's Marriage Breakdown

Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm (1861-2) is peculiarly aware of Charles Dickens, the seemingly unsurpassable celebrity of English letters in the 1850s. This essay examines narrative features of Orley Farm that indicate Dickens was on Trollope's mind-and then asks why. My first answer is that Trollope was, as he began Orley Farm, newly confident and ready to test himself against the towering presence of Dickens. My second is that Orley Farm covertly responds to the public revelations in 1858 of Dickens's marriage breakdown and, presently, his affair with a much younger woman. Trollope plots this, implying a coded rebuke to Dickens and sympathy for his abandoned wife. But this element of Orley Farm is also, I conclude, a coded admonishment to himself since he was conscious of his affection for the much younger Kate Field, whom he had recently met. A Dickensian text in form, appearance, mode, and plot, Orley Farm is also an unusual essay for Trollope on marital infidelity that was, I think, prompted partly by his cloudy anxiety about the implications of Kate and, more clearly, by his vexation with what he perceived to be Dickens's shameful disloyalty.