It may feel as if Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) wrote hundreds of novels. In fact there were just 47—about three times as many as Dickens—cranked out at a pace of one or two a year.

One of those 47 novels was Orley Farm. A while back I got a hankering to read it, and . . .

Allow me to vent.

After poring over the options at Major Online Retailer, I carefully selected the one available edition that professed to have the original Millais illustrations. When it arrived, I found myself holding a volume of raw OCR, and realized that Major Online Retailer, unlike its antiquarian-books subsidiary, does not make it easy to identify and exclude Print On Demand books. If I wanted a nice text and the right illustrations, I would have to prepare it myself. This led to a further interesting discovery: the POD volume used the very same publicly down­loadable OCR that I would use as my own starting point. Same missing or invisible punctu­ation, same scanning errors, same uncorrected typos . . . same two missing pages. That’s why OCR, no matter how good, can only be a starting point.

About the Book

Now then. Ahem. Orley Farm was first published serially—not in a periodical, but as 20 free-standing monthly installments—beginning in March 1861. Look closely at the book, and you will see that each 4-chapter chunk is exactly 32 pages long (two octavo signa­tures) and has exactly two illustrations. In fact this is one of the hidden benefits of serial publication. Even if you end up buying the novel in book form, the pictures will be evenly distri­buted through the volume, instead of being huddled together at the beginning, as so often happens.

For “not in a periodical”, read “not in a British periodical”. Beginning in May 1861 and continuing on a two-month delay to the end of the book, each install­ment appeared in Harper’s (New) Monthly Magazine. I don’t know whether this publication was authorized or not; the International Copyright Act was three decades away, so it may be an academic distinction. If it wasn’t authorized, I can only say they did a very good job of copying the engravings.

Food for thought: The plot of Orley Farm revolves around an act of forgery, twenty years in the past. (If you are French, incidentally, you will have no trouble remembering the calendar date of the Significant Event.) The sole motive of the crime . . . was to ensure something that today would be required by law, namely the support of a minor child.

Dramatis Personae

As you might expect, given the subject, Orley Farm has an enormous number of attorneys. You can tick them off as you meet them:

• Jonathan Usbech (deceased)
• Samuel Dockwrath
• Thomas Furnival and his clerk Crabwitz
• the firm of Round (father Richard, son Matthew) & Crook, with clerk Smart
• Chaffanbrass, whose given name appears to be “Mr.”
• (Judge) Staveley
• Felix Graham
• the firm of Slow & Bideawhile
• Solomon Aram and his (unnamed) clerk
• Mr. Snow’s “very repulsive attorney”, never named
• Sir Richard Leatherham, solicitor-general
• Baron Maltby, presiding judge
• Mr. Steelyard, counsel for the prosecution
• Joseph Mason’s final two attorneys (quoted but never named)

The female characters cannot, of course, be lawyers; instead they are all named Mary. If you include derivatives, compounds and variant forms—Miriam, Maria, Marian, Mary Anne—there are at least seven all told. (Fun fact: In 1922, when women were finally admitted to the English bar, two of the first four were named . . . Mary.)

Illustrations

John Everett Millais (1829–1896) was not much past 30, but was already a Big Name. In Algernon Graves’s eight-volume list of Royal Academy exhibitors, Millais takes up five double-columned pages, which gives you some idea. Highlights include:

• 1840: youngest-ever student at the Royal Academy Schools
• 1846: first exhibited at Royal Academy (“Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru”, according to Graves)
• 1848: co-founder, with William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
• 1855: married Ruskin’s former wife Effie Chalmers—the one whose marriage was famously never consummated because, apparently, yuk, cooties. Millais and Effie went on to have eight children.
• 1863: full member of Royal Academy (he had been an Associate since 1853)
• 1885: baroneted
• 1896: elected president of Royal Academy, though he didn’t have time to do much about it.

He must have liked Trollope, because he took time off from painting to illustrate several of his novels.

The engraver was an equally big name, Dalziel. Didn’t he have a first name? Well, yes, he did: it was George. Or Edward. Or possibly John, or Thomas . . . or Margaret. Or maybe none of these. In addition to the Dalziel Brothers—and sister—themselves, the engraving firm had at least two dozen employees. All used the same “Dalziel” signature.

In this ebook, the illustrations are generally shown where the book put them, shifted to the nearest paragraph break where appropriate. There were some minor rearrange­ments in part 19, involving the frontispiece to Volume II; see notes to part 19 (chapters II.XXXIII-XXXVI).

Formalities

This ebook is based on the 1862 book version (Volume I, Volume II); two missing pages were supplied from a different copy of the same edition. The cover image (above) is from the first serial issue, chosen because the books didn’t have a nice cover. I’ve divided the etext into four-chapter segments, as in the serial version, because it was a convenient size to work with. Besides, it gives a clearer idea of where the cliffhangers—all nineteen of them—fall.

The word “aint” is almost always printed without apostrophe; exceptions—most of them in a single installment—were left as I found them. The words “good­natured” and “illnatured” are sometimes hyphenated, sometimes not. Variation between “The Cleeve” and “the Cleeve” is in the original. It may or may not have been the author’s intention, but it’s what the typesetter set, so there it stands. Line-end hyphens were sometimes invisible. I haven’t identified them indivi­dually; the same goes for other line-final punctuation if the omission was unambiguous. All -ize spellings are in the original. It’s unusual to find these old-fashioned spellings alongside the newfangled single quotation marks (‘inverted commas’)—but, again, there you have it.

The original book was heavily foxed, to the point where a modern humorist would throw in a few additional adjectives like “wolved” or “badgered”. You can expect to find a good many splodges on the illustrations; I didn’t try to clean them up.

Page numbers in [brackets] indicate full-page illustrations that have been moved to the nearest paragraph break. Page numbers ending in “a” were printed as unpaginated plates (blank on the back) facing a numbered page.

Typographical errors are marked with mouse-hover popups and are listed again at the end of each section. The word “invisible” means that the letter or punctuation mark is missing, but there is an appropriately sized blank space.