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.

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

Dr Frederik Van Dam

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.

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.

Register free for the complete series of conference talks

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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.