Tha Is

Bishop Grantly died as he had lived, peaceably, slowly, without pain and without excitement. The breath ebbed from him almost imperceptibly, and for a month before his death, it was a question whether he were alive or dead. In Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, from his series of novels about local British church politics, the first chapter is “Who Will Be the Next Bishop?”  I just began, and I was chortling in my joy at the old bishop’s lingering death before I’d read a page, and within five I was warmly ensconced in the diocese wondering who will be the next bishop?  There’s none of Dickens’s breathtaking, earthshaking insanity in Trollope.  He’s more of an Austenian close observer and fine craftsperson.  Who knows how much fun “3 or 4 families in a country village” can be until they read Pride and Prejudice?  Ditto for the British clergy and Trollope.