So I finished this and was struck by how Trollope provided for a happy ending for everyone. Or maybe happy isn't the word, say instead appropriate in Trollpe's view. In the romance department everyone is matched up with a partner from their correct social class. All the peasants are shown to have been worthy of being at the bottom of the social and economic order. Scrobby is sentenced to a year of hard labor in prison for the crime of poisoning a fox, and thought to have gotten off lightly. Apparently the only way that a fox may be killed is through pursuit by landed gentry on horseback trampling over whose ever property they care to. Goarly abandons Dillsborough in disgrace. Reginald Morton is assimilated to the proper lifestyle of an English squire, giving up all previous useful endeavors for a life of fox hunting and other amusements that a man in his position should occupy his time with, once he inherits the Bragton estate. That at least is one interpretation.

On the other hand maybe Trollope was making an entirely different point, at least for some matters. He never really repudiates Senator Gotobed's astute observations about English society. Lord Rufford is certainly presented as a sorry excuse for a man, one whose only worth is the wealth and title that he inherited. But then again maybe that is my American view of that character, and that Trollope thought him the very model of a country squire.

I did enjoy this enough that I will certainly read more Trollope in the future.