It wasn't a happy time for Ireland, either, and the great potato famine hadn't even started yet. The English of that day were not very interested in reading about the details of daily life of the people whom they were oppressing. Trollope, on the other hand, was a young man just beginning to achieve some success and self-confidence in his voluntary exile to serve among these impoverished people. He used his skills to portray them with accuracy and even with sympathy, even though he was a loyal son of England and man of his times and felt no obligation to accord them any more than token respect. Describing Father Cullen, he writes, "He felt towards Keegan all the abhorrence which a very bigoted and ignorant Roman Catholic could feel towards a Protestant convert." An accurate account, perhaps, but could such a frank sentence be written today? The plot is well laid out, and the story is well told, but the reader is required to plow through the Irish dialect--"'Yer honer won't be afther taking an innocent boy like me,' began Tim, 'that knows nothing at all at all about it.'" This is fair enough--the reader knows he's reading about a different country in a different century--but it does take a bit of adjustment. Trollope loved sporting scenes, usually fox hunting, and in this one we have a horse race scene, described in the words of the spectators much like the scene at Ascot Opening Day in _My Fair Lady_: "There they go--Hurroo! They're off. Faix, there's Playful at her tricks already--by dad she'll be over the ropes!" The pace of the book is leisurely, a common feature of Victorian novels. On the morning after a wedding, the reader is wondering whether any mischief came to Captain Ussher, and whether he survived the night after "the boys" had threatened to put him under the sod. But such concerns must be suspended for an account of how several of the characters felt about things. After four and a half pages of Thady's reflections, he happens to meet Ussher in the road, and the reader surmises that Ussher was not killed. We can see where minimalist fiction came from. Another source of tedium is that the three Macdermots have hardly any redeeming features--a sleazy lot, with whom it is difficult to sympathize. But one does find evidence of Trollope's facility to entertain. He excels in introductory summaries of his characters. About Feemy, whose mother and grandmother had died early, we are told: Whatever her feelings were,--and for her mother they were strong,--the real effect of this was, that she was freed from the restraint and constant scolding of two stupid women at a very early age; consequently she was left alone with her father and her brother, neither of whom were at all fitting guides for so wayward a pupil. . . . Her father had become almost like the tables and chairs in the parlour, only much less useful and more difficult to move.