Following the success of the Trollope Society’s 2026 conference, Trollope: The Law & Transgression, held at Magdalene College, Cambridge, we are delighted to present a series of online Zoom talks featuring conference speakers exploring law, morality, justice, gender, religion, inheritance, equity, and social transgression in the novels of Anthony Trollope.

How Bad is John Caldigate?

Dr Tom Crewe

How bad is John Caldigate? This is the question underlying 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 his voyage to Australia; and of his decision to live with Euphemia Smith out of wedlock. It of course becomes the central question of a legal trial: has he been so very bad as to have committed bigamy? And it hovers over his actions 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. 

In its depiction of these entwined moral, social, and legal pressures, John Caldigate emerges as one of Trollope’s most searching studies of human behaviour, and his most sustained exploration of belief: why people believe, whom they trust, and how prejudice and misapprehension shape judgement. It takes us to the heart of his great and distinctive achievement as a novelist.

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.

Register free for the complete series of conference talks

You only need to register once, you can then attend any of the conference talks without needing to register again. You can cancel your registration at any time.

11 March 2027 at 8pm, Dr Tom Crewe – How Bad is John Caldigate?

8 April 2027 at 8pm, Dr Frederik Van Dam – ‘Some gross insufficiency in the laws of extradition’: Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux

13 May 2027 at 8pm, Professor Linda McClain and Claire Laporte – A Taxonomy of Transgression in Anthony Trollope’s Novels: A Conversation
(The previously advertised date for this meeting was 12 November 2026.)

Click here to register on Zoom to attend Trollope: The Law & Transgression Conference Series

We will send you an email with instructions on how to join. Using Zoom is easy, just click on the link in the email and follow the instructions. Please note that you will not be able to join the meeting until 8.00pm (UK time) on the day.