In the following passage Trollope mockingly describes Lady Lufton's “ideal of life” in which everyone around her would think and act as she wishes. Its satiric method resembles that of Ruskin's famous description of a mill owner's “ideal of human life” in “Traffic.” — George P. Landow.
She liked
cheerful, quiet, well-to-do people, who loved their Church, their
country, and their Queen, and who were not too anxious to make a
noise in the world. She desired that all the farmers round her should
be able to pay their rents without trouble, that all the old women
should have warm flannel petticoats, that the working men should be
saved from rheumatism by healthy food and dry houses, that they
should all be obedient to their pastors and masters—temporal as well
as spiritual. That was her idea of loving her country. She desired
also that the copses should be full of pheasants, the stubble-field
of partridges, and the gorse covers of foxes;—in that way, also, she
loved her country. She had ardently longed, during that Crimean war,
that the Russians might be beaten—but not by the French, to the
exclusion of the English, as had seemed to her to be too much the
case; and hardly by the English under the dictatorship of Lord
Palmerston. Indeed, she had had but little faith in that war after
Lord Aberdeen had been expelled. If, indeed, Lord Derby could have
come in!
Last modified 13 September 2013