Oral presentation

Each paper is allocated a 40-minute slot. Please aim for a 30-minute presentation, followed by 10 minutes for questions and discussion. We would be grateful if speakers could keep closely to time to help the programme run smoothly.

Roundtable session

The roundtable is allocated a 40-minute slot. This session will be discussion-based, and there is no formal presentation length.

We would be grateful if participants could keep closely to time to help the programme run smoothly.

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Mr Dove's Opinion: Custom and Conscience in the World of the Pallisers

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How bad is John Caldigate?

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Unexpected Interventions: Trollope’s Hidden Advocates in Law and Crime

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Justifying Septimus Harding: Ecclesiology and Law in The Warden

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‘Some gross insufficiency in the laws of extradition’: Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux and International Law

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‘Law, Transgression, and Gender Prejudice in Anthony Trollope's Cousin Henry

To be recorded in advance on Zoom, with arrangements for a live Q&A to be confirmed.

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Presence and Absence: Transgressive Trustees and Anthony Trollope

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A Taxonomy of Transgression in Anthony Trollope’s Novels

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Trollope and the Equitable Judgment of Human Failings

Short biography - Up to 150 words/900 characters

Gerard Clarke is a widely experienced dispute resolution lawyer and advocate with experience in commercial disputes and in regulatory and public law. Gerard is experienced in onshore and offshore commercial litigation, arbitration, and mediation, including fraud and asset recovery claims, trust disputes, and corporate insolvency and restructuring, and in judicial review, regulatory disputes, and sport and media law. Gerard has extensive experience of interlocutory, trial, and appellate advocacy, in courts and tribunals at all levels in the UK, BVI, and Cayman. Gerard has advised the Governments of the UK, Hong Kong, the Cayman Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man.

Short biography - Up to 150 words/900 characters

Tom Crewe’s first novel, The New Life, was the Sunday Times’s novel of the year for 2023, and won the Orwell Prize for Fiction, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature, and the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger. He was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Since 2015, he has been an editor at the London Review of Books, to which he has contributed more than forty essays. He recently appeared on an LRB Close Readings podcast, with Professor Dinah Birch, to discuss Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset.

Short biography - Up to 150 words/900 characters

Biography not yet supplied.

Please click 'Amend biography' below and provide a short biography of up to 150 words.

Short biography - Up to 150 words/900 characters

Dr. Mark Rigg is an English literature teacher at the Storm King School, a private boarding school in Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY. He is the author of Preaching in Place: Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Sermon. He holds degrees in English literature and Christian theology.

Short biography - Up to 150 words/900 characters

Frederik Van Dam is Assistant Professor of European Literature at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He is the author of Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form (2016) and the co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope (2019). He is currently finishing a project that deals with British poetry and international cooperation, and his most recent work focuses on Central-European modernism and infrastructure. He chairs the European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres and is one of the editors of the European Journal of English Studies. In 2015, he created The Pleasure of that Obstinacy, a documentary about the place of Trollope in the scholarship of J. Hillis Miller.

Short biography - Up to 150 words/900 characters

Deborah Denenholz Morse is the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Professor at William & Mary. Deborah is the author of Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels, Reforming Trollope, and wide-ranging articles on Trollope. She is lead editor of The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope, and co-editor of The Politics of Gender in the Novels of Anthony Trollope. She also writes and edits frequently on the Brontës, on Elizabeth Gaskell, and in Animal Studies.

Short biography - Up to 150 words/900 characters

Dr Hazel Vosper holds an MA in Historical Research, and her PhD thesis examined the social, cultural, and legal influences on female investors in England from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. She is an independent scholar whose research focuses on women’s financial agency, the historical experiences of female investors, and their representation in print culture.

Short biography - Up to 150 words/900 characters per panel member

Linda C. McClain is Robert Kent Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. She writes about family law, gender and law, civil rights, and constitutional law. She has written several articles and book chapters on the novels of Anthony Trollope (two with Allison Tait).

Claire Laporte is the President of The Trollope Society USA and is Vice-Chair of a public hospital system in Massachusetts. She writes weekly essays on literature, which are available at https://clairelaporte.substack.com//.  A former intellectual property lawyer, Claire has spoken widely on topics from industrial policy to AI.

Allison Tait is a professor at the Richmond Law School. She writes about inheritance rules, family money, and the role of marriage in creating wealth inequality. Her book, Family Money, explores the ways that debt governance and wealth management intersect and will be published by University of California Press (2026).

Short biography - Up to 150 words/900 characters

Professor Gary Watt Jurisprudence MA (Oxon) Literature Phd (Warwick), School of Law, University of Warwick. Founding co-editor of Law and Humanities; General Editor of Bloomsbury’s A Cultural History of Law; Monographs include Trusts and Equity (Oxford), Equity Stirring (Hart), Shakespeare’s Acts of Will (Arden Shakespeare), Shakespeare and the Law (Oxford).

Description of your presentation for the programme, up to 75 words/1050 characters

Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds introduces two of the most realistic lawyers in Victorian fiction, the indefatigable solicitor Mr Camperdown, and the learned barrister Mr Dove, to whom Mr Camperdown turns for advice about the diamonds purloined by Lizzie Eustace.

Mr Dove's Opinion, written for Trollope by a friend at the Chancery Bar, upsets Mr Camperdown's ideas about custom. Mr Dove indicates a kinder disposition towards Lizzie than might be expected. Enforcer though he be of the property rights of the monied classes, Mr Dove has some unexpected views on the "simple dirty matter of money".

This paper considers Mr Dove's Opinion about the diamonds, and his views about Lizzie Eustace and property. Is he right about the law of heirlooms? More importantly, how does Trollope use Mr Dove as a critical commentator on the doings of the rich?

Description of your presentation for the programme, up to 175 words

Thank you for submitting the abstract for your paper. To use this material in the conference programme, we ask that the presentation description is no more than 175 words. A suggested draft is shown below.

If you are happy with this wording, please confirm the presentation description. Alternatively, you may provide a revised description, up to a maximum of 175 words.

Suggested draft

How bad is John Caldigate? This is the question at the heart of Trollope’s novel, named for its eminently questionable hero. It is asked of John’s conduct as a student, which costs him his patrimony and estranges him from his father; of his behaviour towards his cousin Julia and his friend Dick’s sister; of his actions on the voyage to Australia; and of his decision to live with Euphemia Smith out of wedlock. It becomes, of course, the central question of a legal trial: has he been so very bad as to have committed bigamy? It also hovers over his conduct during the trial itself.

The question is one his wife, Hester, must confront as she decides whether to stand by him regardless of the verdict. It drives her mother, certain of the answer, to extremes of intolerance and manipulation. Through these entwined moral, social, and legal pressures, John Caldigate emerges as one of Trollope’s most searching studies of human behaviour.

The novel is also Trollope’s most sustained exploration of belief: why people believe, whom they trust, and how prejudice and misapprehension shape judgement. It stands as one of his most demanding and underrated achievements.

Description of your presentation for the programme, up to 175 words

Thank you for submitting the abstract for your paper. To use this material in the conference programme, we ask that the presentation description is no more than 175 words. A suggested draft is shown below.

If you are happy with this wording, please confirm the presentation description. Alternatively, you may provide a revised description, up to a maximum of 175 words.

Suggested draft

This paper explores the ways in which Trollope uses unexpected interventions to resolve difficult legal situations, often through figures who operate quietly behind the scenes before emerging at the last possible moment. Three examples, drawn from across Trollope’s career and covering different kinds of legal peril, illustrate this recurring narrative strategy.

The first is Mr Toogood in The Last Chronicle of Barset, who, working largely unseen and assisted by Johnny Eames, painstakingly unravels the apparently hopeless case of Mr Crawley’s alleged theft. The second is Marie Goesler in Phineas Redux, whose determined investigation, pursued at great personal cost, uncovers the truth in a murder trial that comes perilously close to sending Phineas Finn to the gallows. The third is Mr Bagwax in John Caldigate, an unlikely saviour whose persistence overturns what appears to be a proven case of bigamy.

These benevolent interventions are contrasted with the darker figure of Mr Dockwrath in Orley Farm, whose malevolent determination brings about Lady Mason’s downfall. Together, these cases reveal Trollope’s skill in creating suspense through legal narratives that are less ‘whodunnits’ than ‘how-done-its’, and invite reflection on justice, chance, and character.

Description of your presentation for the programme, up to 175 words

Thank you for submitting the abstract for your paper. To use this material in the conference programme, we ask that the presentation description is no more than 175 words. A suggested draft is shown below.

If you are happy with this wording, please confirm the presentation description. Alternatively, you may provide a revised description, up to a maximum of 175 words.

Suggested draft

Trollope’s Barchester novels draw on a range of ecclesiastical commitments with deep roots in Anglicanism. This paper argues that Septimus Harding and Archdeacon Grantly are best understood as representatives of fundamentally contrasting approaches to church and church law.

The warrant for this approach lies in the novel’s central dispute: a medieval Roman Catholic bequest subjected to the legal and moral scrutiny of Victorian Anglican England. This controversy is not simply about the temptations of wealth but enables a wider ecclesial struggle between competing visions of church authority and church law.

Anglicanism differs from traditional Protestantism in retaining a largely Catholic hierarchy and a strong commitment to church law as a force in the world. At the same time, it shares with Protestant traditions an emphasis on doctrines such as justification by grace, which are sceptical of legalism.

Two theological frameworks illuminate the complexity of Harding and Grantly. Avery Dulles’s Models of the Church reveals Grantly as an advocate of the Church as Sacrament, while Harding comes to embody the Church as Servant. Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, with its contrast between ecclesiologies of glory and of the cross, further sharpens this distinction. Together, these perspectives deepen our understanding of the novel’s dispute, characters, and narrative resolution.

Description of your presentation for the programme, up to 175 words

Thank you for submitting the abstract for your paper. To use this material in the conference programme, we ask that the presentation description is no more than 175 words. A suggested draft is shown below.

If you are happy with this wording, please confirm the presentation description. Alternatively, you may provide a revised description, up to a maximum of 175 words.

Suggested draft

In his travel book North America (1862), Trollope claims to have little interest in international law, remarking that he refused to read authorities such as Wheaton or Phillimore, relying instead on his own common sense. Taken at face value, this assertion is difficult to sustain. Trollope refers to international law in a number of his writings, and the professional and intellectual circles in which he moved would inevitably have exposed him to contemporary debates on the subject.

Moreover, Trollope’s work for the Post Office, including his role in negotiating postal treaties in Central America and Egypt, would scarcely have been entrusted to someone without at least a working knowledge of international legal principles. This paper suggests that Trollope’s fiction, and his political thinking more broadly, can be better understood when placed within the context of Victorian international law.

To explore this claim, the paper offers a close reading of Phineas Redux, arguing that changing Victorian conceptions of extradition and the right of asylum play a significant, if often understated, role in shaping the novel’s plot and its moral and political concerns.

Description of your presentation for the programme, up to 175 words

Thank you for submitting the abstract for your paper. To use this material in the conference programme, we ask that the presentation description is no more than 175 words. A suggested draft is shown below.

If you are happy with this wording, please confirm the presentation description. Alternatively, you may provide a revised description, up to a maximum of 175 words.

Suggested draft

Anthony Trollope’s short novel Cousin Henry centres on a transgression of the spirit rather than the strict letter of the law. From the outset, the offence is clear: Henry knows where his uncle Indefer has hidden a later will that would disinherit the rightful heir, but he conceals this knowledge. Trollope’s interest lies less in legal procedure than in Henry’s inner life and in the responses of those around him, from the morally upright Isabel Brodrick to the resolute family solicitor, Mr Apjohn.

The novel’s deeper mystery, however, lies in the visceral revulsion Henry inspires. Nearly everyone who encounters him expresses intense loathing, often in strikingly hyperbolic terms. This language is accompanied by repeated suggestions that Henry is deficient in conventional manliness, accused of weakness, emotional excess, and an inability to “face it like a man”.

Trollope appears to interrogate the prejudice generated by Henry’s presentation of gender difference. The extremity of Henry’s own perceptions gradually shifts the reader’s sympathy towards him. Although legally and socially absolved in the end, Henry remains marked by the ordeal. This paper argues that Cousin Henry offers not only a critique of primogeniture, but a broader and more searching examination of gender prejudice.

Description of your presentation for the programme, up to 175 words

Thank you for submitting your abstract. If you are happy for us to use this wording in the programme, please confirm the presentation description. Alternatively, you may provide a revised description, up to a maximum of 175 words.

Suggested draft

Transgressive trustees were a frequent subject in Victorian newspapers, parliamentary debates, and popular novels. Yet, although legal trusts—whether created through wills or marriage settlements—feature in many of Anthony Trollope’s works, the figure of the trustee rarely takes centre stage. The principal exception is Alaric Tudor’s fraudulent behaviour in ‘The Three Clerks’. This absence is striking, given the narrative potential of trustee misconduct: family disappointments, courtroom disputes, questions of financial morality, and the gendered dynamics of power—all themes that recur elsewhere in Trollope’s fiction.

The purpose of this paper is to explore that absence. First, it will examine how trustee misconduct was perceived and represented in Victorian life from a historical perspective. Second, it will analyse Alaric Tudor’s failure to fulfil his trustee duties and assess how this storyline was received by Trollope’s contemporary critics. Finally, the paper will adopt a more speculative approach, considering whether the very absence of trustees in Trollope’s novels may occasionally have served a narrative function, shaping the plots in ways their presence might not have allowed.

Description of your presentation for the programme, up to 175 words

Thank you for submitting the abstract for your paper. To use this material in the conference programme, we ask that the presentation description is no more than 175 words. A suggested draft is shown below.

If you are happy with this wording, please confirm the presentation description. Alternatively, you may provide a revised description, up to a maximum of 175 words.

Suggested draft

This paper offers a taxonomy of transgression in Trollope’s novels, identifying the different ways in which characters violate both legal rules and social norms. In the legal sphere, transgressions most often concern inheritance and marriage law. Inheritance law is breached through a forged will in Orley Farm, the fraudulent manipulation of inheritance rules in Mr Scarborough’s Family, and the deliberate concealment of a will in Cousin Henry. Transgressions of marriage law recur in Trollope’s treatments of bigamy and cohabitation, including Castle Richmond, The Belton Estate, John Caldigate, and Dr Wortle’s School, as well as in narratives of marital failure such as He Knew He Was Right and Phineas Redux.

Trollope’s characters also break social rules, particularly those governing gender and class. Heroines who reject conventional ideals of womanhood, often by pursuing wealth or status over love, face severe consequences, while men who violate norms of honour, fidelity, and self-restraint are similarly punished. Trollope also explores changing laws of class and marriage across social boundaries. Across these categories, he constructs a hierarchy of transgression, revealing both the rules themselves and the moral weight of breaking them.

Description of your presentation for the programme, up to 175 words

Thank you for submitting the abstract for your paper. To use this material in the conference programme, we ask that the presentation description is no more than 175 words. A suggested draft is shown below.

If you are happy with this wording, please confirm the presentation description. Alternatively, you may provide a revised description, up to a maximum of 175 words.

Suggested draft

In a 2016 article, “Where the Shoe Pinches” (Pólemos), Professor Gary Watt examined The Warden and Septimus Harding’s pursuit of what Harding calls “true equity”. This paper extends that enquiry into the wider landscape of Barsetshire and into a contemporary church land dispute with echoes of The Vicar of Bullhampton. It argues that Trollope’s fiction stages the equitable virtue of epieikeia, as articulated by Aristotle, as a guide to human judgement in the context of law.

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle presents equity as attention to the lawgiver rather than the law, the spirit rather than the letter, and the intention rather than the act. The paper traces how this Aristotelian virtue was adapted within English common law by Chancery judges, often motivated by clerical concerns to restrain unconscionably strict reliance on rules.

With this clerical inflection of mercy, equity presides over Trollope’s English landscapes. As Durey observes, the Barsetshire novels “lead us into the temptation of loving the leading ecclesiastical characters for their weaknesses as much as for their strengths” (2002).

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