Years ago, an acquaintance disclosed that his mother now read nothing but Trollope. That is: She would read through all the novels, and by the time she was done, it was time to start over. (Analogies to the Golden Gate Bridge present themselves.) That’s the kind of thing you can do when an author’s oeuvre includes, if I remember rightly, forty-seven novels.

The Small House at Allington was originally published in The Cornhill Magazine in twenty installments of three chapters each, beginning in Vol. VI no. 3 (September 1862) and winding up in Vol. IX no. 4 (April 1864). Trivia: For its first few years, the editor of Cornhill was another Big Name, William Makepeace Thackeray. He retired shortly before Small House began its run—and died in 1863, so he never got to read how it turns out.

Illustrations

The Small House at Allington was illustrated by the same Millais-and-Dalziel combination—artist and engraver(s)—seen in Orley Farm. For more about both, see that title. In addition to a full-page picture, each installment opened with a decorative initial, which the book leaves out. I have, as usual, restored them.

In the periodical, the illustration was always placed at the beginning of the installment. In the book, each was moved close to the text it illustrates—with the obvious exception of the two frontispieces, which I have moved to their appro­priate place in the text.

The final two installments had no illustration; the second-to-last had no decorative initial. Was Millais called away unexpectedly?

The Dales and Others

The book focuses on the Dale family:

• Christopher Dale, squire Allington, unmarried
• his brother Col. Orlando Dale, m. Fanny, daughter of the previous Earl de Guest. (We will meet the present Earl, and his unmarried sister Julia.) The couple are not deceased but are living at Torquay, which I gather is very nearly the same thing. Their children include
  — Capt. Bernard Dale of the corps of engineers, the squire’s heir
  and assorted daughters who don’t figure in the plot
• deceased brother Philip Dale, leaving his widow Mary (current occupant of the Small House) and their daughters:
  — Isabella (Bell)
  — Lilian (Lily)

Two of the male leads are unfortunately named Crofts and Crosbie. Trollope seems to do this pretty often, though I don’t think it is intentional. Luckily they are never in the same place at the same time.

And speaking of Crofts . . . In Cornhill, the doctor’s name started out as “Croft”, singular, changing to “Crofts” in the fifth installment (a new volume, though this may be coincidence). In the book it is “Crofts” from the outset.

Later we will meet assorted other characters from the Anthony Trollope Extended Universe. That includes Plantagenet Palliser, heir to the Duke of Omnium. If anyone wondered, he is “Mr. Palliser” rather than Lord Something-or-Other because he is the Duke’s nephew, not his son. Technically he is only heir-presumptive, not heir-apparent—the Duke could, at any time, marry and beget a son—and will remain so until the moment of the Duke’s death.

Houses Large and Small

As explained in an early chapter, the “Small House” of the title doesn’t mean a house that happens not to be very big. Instead it is what, in a grander property, would be called the Dower House. It was previously occupied by the Squire’s widowed mother, and now by his widowed sister-in-law.

Characters in this book are very concerned with money. So it may be useful to list some figures from Beeton’s Book of Household Management, published at very nearly the same time as Small House. If your annual income was X, your household would include Y:

• About £1,000 a year: A cook, upper housemaid, nursemaid, under housemaid, and a man servant.
• About £750 a year: A cook, housemaid, nursemaid, and footboy.
• About £500 a year: A cook, housemaid, and nursemaid.
• About £300 a year: A maid-of-all-work and nursemaid.
• About £200 or £150 a year: A maid-of-all-work (and girl occasionally).

Language

After the third occurrence of forms like “it behoved him” or “it would now behove him” I had to look it up—and learned that “behove” was and remains an accepted British variant of “behoove”.

I also became acquainted with “flit” in the specific sense of “move house”. (This one intrigued me because its Norwegian cognate, flytte, similarly carries both meanings: to move-in-general, or to move house.)

Every now and then, the author decides that “De Courcy” or “De Guest” should instead be “de Courcy” or “de Guest”. I have left them as I found them.

Formalities

The text of this ebook is based on the two-volume Smith, Elder (London 1864) edition: Volume I, Volume II. In the printed book, each volume’s chapters were numbered from I through XXX, thirty per volume. For the ebook have restored the serial’s continuous numbering, from I through LX (sixty). As described above, the two frontispieces have been moved to the chapters they “belong” to.

Typographical errors are marked with mouse-hover popups and are listed again at the end of each chapter. The word “invisible” means that the letter or punctuation mark is missing, but there is an appropriately sized blank space. “Corrected from Cornhill” means that I had doubts, so I checked the book’s reading against the serial.