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I have just finished also, and I enjoyed it very much.
I think Trollope cleverly uses Senator Gotobed to criticise many of the institutions of the day, which clearly deserved criticism - the electoral boroughs, the purchase of commissions in the Army so that any incompetent ninny could lead his men to disaster because he or his father had bought his officer rank, the allocation of "livings" in the church, and so on.
At the same time, the Senator is a wonderful example of what one of our lecturers in Psychology told us about culture: as an outsider you can observe a culture but you cannot understand it, while a person inside the culture cannot see it - it is simply "the way we do things here". (I'm using culture to mean the way a group lives and works, not in reference to artistic pursuits.)
Witty and most enjoyable. Thanks for nominating it, issybird.
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