'The Pallisers' by Anthony TROLLOPE as Abridged and Introduced by Michael HARDWICK. Published in hardback by Book Club Associates by arrangement with Weidenfield & Nicolson Limited, London, please note that this book is a 1973 edition book which is in excellent condition and is NOT price-clipped at all. Shipping costs are £3.49p by Royal Mail; 2nd Class parcel services (this is the actual cost of postage - I don't charge for packaging).
The Palliser novels are six novels written in series by Anthony Trollope. They were more commonly known as the Parliamentary novels prior to their 1974 television dramatisation by the BBC broadcast as The Pallisers. Marketed as "polite literature" during their initial publication, the novels encompass several literary genres including: family saga, bildungsroman, picaresque, as well as satire and parody of Victorian (or English) life, and criticism of the British government's predilection for attracting corrupt and corruptible people to power.
The common characters throughout the series are the wealthy aristocrat and politician Plantagenet Palliser, and his wife, Lady Glencora. The plots involve British and Irish politics in varying degrees, specifically in and around Parliament. The Pallisers themselves do not always play major roles, and in The Eustace Diamonds they merely comment on the main action.
The series overlaps with Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire, also a series of six novels, which deal with life in the fictional county Barsetshire where the Palliser family is politically important.
Trollope considered Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux and The Prime Minister to be the four novels that constitute the Palliser series.
Anthony Trollope's sequence of Six Palliser or 'parliamentary' novels follows the misfortunes of Plantagenet Palliser - dedicated politician, heir to the greatest dukedom in Britain and subsequently Prime Minister - and his beautiful extrovert wife Glencora. Interwoven with their story, which is spread over many years, are those of a host of 'Planty Pal's' colleagues and Glencora's social allies and rivals - a contrasting procession including the wily Lizzie Eystace, who comes adrift in manipulating the outcome of the 'theft' of a family heirloom; the naïf Irishman Phineas Finn and his four loves; the fiery, hard-riding Lord Chiltern and the homicidally deranged Robert Kennedy; the scheming Reverend Joseph Emillius and Ferdinand Lopez; and those romantically dangerous cads George Vavasor and Burgo Fitzgerald.
The conflicts and relationships between these and many others make up a saga of jealousy, romance, intrigue, blackmail and even murder, in the context of London social and political life in the 1860s and 70s.
The original text of the Palliser Novels amounts to more than a million and a half words, written for leisured Victorian readers - full of repetitions, digressions, redundant sub-plots and, not least, eminently expendable verbiage. For the taste of modern readers with neither the time not the inclination to tackle such indigestible fare, this abridged version has been made by Michael Hardwick, who is a Trollope expert and a highly experienced condenser pf classic material for the media of print and broadcasting. Through what has been literally as word-by-word process of elimination from the mammoth original readable single volume, without recourse to linking material or explanatory notes, yet without sacrifice of the story-lines, atmosphere or invention of Trollope's great work.
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The author: Anthony TROLLOPE (24 April 1815 to 6 December 1882) was an English novelist and civil servant of the Victorian era. Among his best-known works is a series of novels collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, which revolves around the imaginary county of Barsetshire. He also wrote novels on political, social, and gender issues, and other topical matters. Trollope's literary reputation dipped during the last years of his life, but he regained somewhat of a following by the mid-20th century.