SOURCE: An introduction to Castle Richmond, by Anthony Trollope, edited by David Skilton, The Trollope Society, 1994, pp. vii-xvi.

In this excerpt from Hastings' introduction to Anthony Trollope's Castle Richmond (1860), the critic argues that a primary reason for the novel's commercial failure was the fact that Victorians preferred not to read about such an unpleasant chapter from recent history, and later readers, Hastings contends, have looked disfavorably upon both the "detachment with which Trollope wrote of the famine and its consequences" and Trollope's apparent view that the Famine was a "blessing in disguise. "

. . . [T]he most persistent and damaging criticism of Castle Richmond since its publication is directed against Trollope's attempt to marry his romance to a backdrop of one of the greatest tragedies of the nineteenth century, the Irish potato famine. 'Those who saw its course, and watched its victims', he wrote sombrely, 'will not readily forget what...