Hm....an interesting development in this book. There is talk of red herrings (page 88) and strychnine. I wondered if the expression 'red herring' was already in use in Trollope's days. And presto(from Wikipedia):
"Red herring is an English-language idiom, a logical fallacy that misleads or detracts from the issue.[1] It is also a literary device that leads readers or characters towards a false conclusion, often used in mystery or detective fiction.
The origin of the expression has a number of theories. Conventional wisdom has long attributed it to a technique of training hounds to follow a scent, or of distracting hounds during a fox hunt, but modern linguistic research suggests that it was most likely a literary device invented in 1807 by English polemicist William Cobbett, and never an actual practice of hunters
That makes me wonder if ' beating the wine' also has an ulterior meaning.
There is more to this book than meets the eye....
