f all such reformers Mr. Sentiment is the most powerful. It is
incredible the number of evil practices he has put down: it is to be
feared he will soon lack subjects, and that when he has made the
working classes comfortable, and enough bitter beer put into proper-sized
pint bottles, there will be nothing further for him left to do. Mr.
Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less
so that his good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people
so very hard; and the genuinely honest so very honest. Namby-pamby
in these days is not thrown away if it be introduced in the proper
quarters. Divine peeresses are no longer interesting, though possessed
of every virtue; but a pattern peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much twaddle as one of Mrs. Radcliffe's
heroines, and still be listened to. Perhaps, however, Mr. Sentiment's
great attraction is in his second-rate characters. If his heroes and
heroines walk upon stilts, as heroes and heroines, I fear, ever must,
their attendant satellites are as natural as though one met them in the
street: they walk and talk like men and women, and live among our
friends a rattling, lively life; yes, live, and will live till the names
of their callings shall be forgotten in their own, and Buckett and
Mrs. Gamp will be the only words left to us to signify a detective
police officer or a monthly nurse.
"The Almshouse" opened with a scene in a clergyman's house Every luxury to be purchased by wealth was described as being there: all the appearances of household indulgence generally found among the most self-indulgent of the rich were crowded into this abode. Here the reader was introduced to the demon of the book, the Mephistopheles of the drama. What story was ever written without a demon? what novel, what history, what work of any sort, what world, would be perfect without existing principles both of good and evil? The demon of the "Almshouse" was the clerical owner of this comfortable abode. He was a man well stricken in years, but still strong to do evil: he was one who looked cruelly out of a hot, passionate, bloodshot eye; who had a huge red nose with a carbuncle, thick lips, and a great double, flabby chin, which swelled out into solid substance, like a turkey cock's comb, when sudden anger inspired him: he had a hot, furrowed, low brow, from which a few grizzled hairs were not yet rubbed off by the friction of his handkerchief: he wore a loose cornstarched white handkerchief, black loose ill-made clothes, and huge loose shoes, adapted to many corns and various bunions: his husky voice told tales of much daily port wine, and his language was not so decorous as became a clergyman. Such was the master of Mr. Sentiment's "Almshouse." He was a widower, but at present accompanied by two daughters, and a thin and somewhat insipid curate.
References
Trollope, Anthony. "Tom Towers, Dr. Anticant, and Mr. Sentiment." The Warden. World Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Last modified 2000