Farewell Tolstoy, hello Trollope. Julian Fellowes, fresh from Downton success, is bringing Trollope’s Doctor Thorne to the screen hopefully before we’re overcome by withdrawal symptoms from War and Peace. It’s scheduled to be a three-parter. Too short, say I. Trollope writes big. The Barsetshire saga, of which the story of the good doctor of Greshambury is the third instalment, runs to three quarters of a million words. Think War and Peace times five.
“Baggy monsters”, sneered Henry James about the big Victorian novel. He was always slightly snide about Trollope. “A novelist who hunted the fox” he called him, as if his fiction brought with it a faint redolence of horse manure. Healthier than the Yankee bull-manure, Trollope would have retorted (he made the