_The Fixed Period_ is a clever joke that gets old pretty quickly. People have strong feelings about the sanctity of human life, especially when the issue becomes personal. There is a place for black humor, but it must be sought with great care. The appreciative target audience for Trollope's venture into such waters turns out to have been pretty small. Alas, this small audience happened to include a departing great physician. DETAILS ABOUT ENTAILS MR. SCARBOROUGH'S FAMILY Our attorney smiled when he came to the passage, "heirs of his body," in going through our family legal documents, explaining that it was an archaic usage derived from old English law. The term, as used in a deed, creates a "fee tail," so that the property in question goes to the recipient and the heirs begotten by the landowner himself. (On the other hand, "fee simple" allows the property to be passed on to the property owner's heirs, whatever their parentage.) Land under these conditions was thus in tail, or entailed. The law of entail, which was a prominent feature of Victorian English society, is the basis of the plot of _Mr. Scarborough's Family_. Entail was created in England in 1285 and was useful to feudal lords in keeping property in the family and undivided, with all the real estate going to the oldest son. Landed gentry tended to favor this arrangement, which promoted stability in feudal society; it was not favored by the monarchy or the merchants. Entail was abolished in England in 1925; in the United States, only four states still recognize entail. Similar goals may be achieved, these days, with trusts. Mr. Scarborough, however, succeeds in overcoming the limitations of the entail. His property is entailed to his oldest son; since he can't do anything about that, he changes his oldest son. When Mountjoy Scarborough, his firstborn, demonstrates an addiction to gambling, Mr. Scarborough declares that Mountjoy is illegitimate, and he produces marriage documents from a marriage to Mountjoy's mother _after_ Mountjoy was born, thus making the gambling addict illegitimate. The second son, Augustus, becomes the eldest legitimate son. No one has any proof of an earlier marriage, and Mr. Scarborough has his way. Since this was a "three-volume novel" (Trollope's last of this length), another plot was required, and it too involves an entail. Harry Annesley, declared in Chapter III to be "the hero of this story," is the recognized heir to the estate of his uncle, Peter Prosper, who is fifty years of age and has never married. Mr. Prosper, however, becomes cross with his heir, who has failed to show sufficient respect on his visits in his youth, and he begins to consider marriage to a forty year old woman in an effort to "beget issue," an heir of his own. This was a legal and accepted method of attempting to circumvent a burdensome entail, as opposed to Mr. Scarborough's iniquitous method of branding his eldest son as a bastard.