The Spectral Famine in Anthony Trollope's Castle Richmond

Abstract

Abstract:

Anthony Trollope’s Castle Richmond (1860) is one of the period’s rare novels on the Irish Famine written by an English writer. In the rapidly changing society of the long nineteenth-century England, the novel form had gradually assumed a social function that interrogated unprecedented progress caused by rapid urbanization, industrialization, and imperialism, albeit from a conventionally middle-class perspective. Regardless, the Irish Famine was underrepresented in the genre, especially given how authors portrayed at length the massacres and uprisings that occurred in the English colonies such as India and the Caribbean Islands. Trollope was not to blame for this problem: in addition to his four other novels set in Ireland, Castle Richmond is directly related to the famine. My aim in this essay is to argue that the spectrality of the famine plot haunts (as it were) the novel’s main plot, which follows Realistic Victorian Novel conventions. Instead of merely nodding to progressivist ideas, the sudden, unexpected, and disruptive scenes of the famine plot deviate from the realist thread, however briefly, and adulterate the narrative with Gothic undertones. Moreover, these brief famine scenes, which can alternatively be defined as “snapshots” of trauma, question English famine policy. The scenes thereby gain a thematic importance to the novel’s otherwise predictable Victorian plot.