SOURCE: “Parsons, Priests, and Politics: Anthony Trollope's Irish Clergy,” Eire Ireland, Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 80-97.

In the following essay, Johnston assesses Trollope's portrayal of members of the clergy in his Irish novels, and maintains that Trollope's views regarding both Irish Catholic and Irish Anglican clergymen are more complex than critics typically assume.

Couple the name Anthony Trollope with the word “clergy,” and the coupling will likely produce a series of images of that galaxy of colorful Anglican clerics in rural Barsetshire. Trollope, however, created another colorful collection of clerics, both Anglican and Roman Catholic, in his novels of Victorian Ireland, where he lived, as a British Post Office official, from 1841 to 1859. Trollope's portrayals of these Irish clergy appear in the novels The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847), The Kellys and the O'Kellys (1848), Castle Richmond (1860), An Eye for an Eye (1879), and the unfinished The Landleaguers (1883).

That noteworthy clerical characters figure...