Trollope and the Hunt for West Country Identity

Abstract

This essay explores the intersection between the politics of regionalism and recreation in Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire novels. The relationship between narrative structure and local environment articulated in Trollope's series links the form of the Victorian regional novel to an interrogation of England's relationship to its internal geography by questioning, in effect, how a region can remain autonomous and yet be a resource for national identity. Trollope's response is to use the regional practice of fox-hunting to preserve the West Country's unique place in the national imagination through sport. Situating the Barsetshire novels within hunting's vexed place in nineteenth-century rural communities and focusing on Doctor Thorne, I suggest that Trollope advances a conservative ideology that the region's identity can only be sustained through preserving country house culture. Trollope represents hunting as an ingrained rural custom, thus paradoxically using a national sport to promote regional insularity and justify the landowning class' social control of the region.