Anthony Trollope said that before he decided on "Castle Richmond" as the title for the book, he considered a title which would mention the famine. Such a title would have been more descriptive, though it might perhaps have discouraged a number of readers, including me. This would have been unfortunate, because in stumbling into the unknown territory of one of his lesser known novels, I found myself immersed in the most powerful chapter I have found in Trollope. One would have to survey Holocaust and other war stories for chapters of similar impact. Young Herbert Fitzgerald sets out to ride across the countryside to Desmond Court, the home of his fiancée, to determine whether their marriage is to take place, and in so doing he encounters a rainstorm, forcing him to seek shelter. He enters a cabin without knocking; he even rides his horse inside, which, the author assures us, was customary there. The interior is so dark he at first cannot tell whether anyone is at home. The floor is sod, the walls are bare, and there is only a very little furniture, very plain. As his eyes become accustomed to the dark, he sees a woman sitting cross-legged on the floor with a baby in her arms. He later discovers the body of a four-year-old daughter in the corner. In those days there was a form of face which came upon the sufferers when their state of misery was far advanced, and which was a sure sign that their last stage of misery was nearly run. The mouth would fall and seem to hang, the lips at the two ends of the mouth would be dragged down, and the lower parts of the cheeks would fall as though they had been dragged and pulled. There were no signs of acute agony when this phasis of countenance was to be seen, none of the horrid symptoms of gnawing hunger by which one generally supposes that famine is accompanied. The look is one of apathy, desolation, and death. When custom had made these signs easily legible, the poor doomed wretch was known with certainty. Sir William Osler could hardly have written a more informative description of the clinical signs of starvation in _The Principles and Practice of Medicine_. Trollope knew the signs; he had gone to Ireland in 1841 as a clerk to a postal surveyor, traveling about the country under orders from the surveyors. He was promoted to surveyor fifteen years later, and he did not return to England until 1859, the year he began _Castle Richmond_. Mike, the starving woman's husband, had become a cripple through rheumatism and could not do the public work on the roads. This would have qualified him and his family for the poorhouse, but he may not have known this. He had found someone who would hire him to do a little work in return for a little food, and he had stolen from his employer a small amount of "Indian corn-flour"--the yellow meal made from corn sent from America--but it had failed to sustain her and the children.