Mr Peacocke, a Classical scholar, has come to Broughtonshire with his beautiful American wife to live as a schoolmaster. But when the blackmailing brother of her American first husband appears at the school gates, their dreadful secret is revealed, and the county is scandalized. In the character of Dr Wortle, the combative but warm-hearted headmaster, who takes the couple's part in the face of general ostracism, there is an element of self-portrait. There are echoes, too, in Wortle's gallantry to Mrs Peacocke, of Trollope's own attachment to the vivacious Bostonian, Kate Field. With its scathing depiction of American manhood, its jousting with convention and its amiable, egotistical protagonist, Dr Wortle's School (1879) is one of the sharpest and most engaging of Trollope's later novels. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Author
Anthony Trollope became one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of Trollope's best-loved works, known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire; he also wrote penetrating novels on political, social, and gender issues and conflicts of his day. Trollope has always been a popular novelist. Noted fans have included Sir Alec Guinness (who never travelled without a Trollope novel), former British Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Sir John Major, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, American novelists Sue Grafton and Dominick Dunne and soap opera writer Harding Lemay. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he regained the esteem of critics by the mid-twentieth century. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony\_...
