Is He Popenjoy?
Notes
Erika and I are watching the HBO show The Gilded Age. It’s a Julian Fellowes show, who is on record as being a Trollope fan, and it’s interesting to see how many plot points get drawn from these. Here’s another young man with a meager inheritance looking to marry a richer heiress. Here’s another young woman pressured into a marriage with a nice, suitable man that she doesn’t quite love (yet!). Here’s another scheming rich family trying to marry into the peerage, and then battling over class associations. And those are just the marriage plots in Popenjoy!
Noted on July 13, 2026
The weirdest-named Trollope book so far; a fairly low-key novel about inheritance and identities. The titular question: the old heir to the estate has been abroad for decades, and returns with a new wife and baby that can inherit the things others expected. But IS the baby legitimate? Is he REALLY Popenjoy?
Reading this on the heels of Armadale, which also has a big plot point about a scheme to defraud an estate with a secret 'foreign' marriage.
Reading this on the heels of Armadale, which also has a big plot point about a scheme to defraud an estate with a secret 'foreign' marriage.
Noted on June 29, 2026
Quotes
[ Love this metaphor for ‘a person doing an introduction and stealing the thunder of the main speaker’: ] Like a good chairwoman, she took none of the bread out of the Baroness's mouth.Quoted on June 29, 2026
[ We are all writing short messages ] In olden times, fifteen or twenty years ago, when telegraph wires were still young, and messages were confined to diplomatic secrets, horse-racing, and the rise and fall of stocks, lovers used to indulge in rapturous expressions which would run over pages; but the pith and strength of laconic diction has now been taught to us by the self-sacrificing patriotism of the Post Office. We have all felt the vigour of telegrammatic expression, and, even when we do not trust the wire, we employ the force of wiry language.Quoted on June 29, 2026
There are spectacles which are so much more spectacles than other spectacles that they make the beholder feel that there is before him a pair of spectacles carrying a face, rather than a face carrying a pair of spectacles.Quoted on June 29, 2026
When such a man as he appears suddenly with a foreign woman and a foreign child, and announces one as his wife and the other as his heir, having never reported the existence of one or of the other, it is time that some enquiry should be made.Quoted on July 13, 2026
But still,—still it is so poor a thing to miss your plum because you do not dare to shake the tree! It is especially so, if you are known as a professional stealer of plums!Quoted on July 13, 2026