A financier arrives in London with a railway scheme, no money and a daughter to marry off, and the whole of society decides not to ask questions. Trollope wrote it in a rage after returning from Australia to find England, as he thought, dishonest through and through. It is his angriest book and now his most quoted. Fifty-seven plates of painting by James Tissot and William Powell Frith, among others, catch the railway platforms, marriage markets and dinner tables of Trollope's London.
