Bigamy and the Creole Beauty: Race and Anxiety in Dr. Wortle’s School

This lecture takes a new look at Dr. Wortle’s School (1881), a late novel by Anthony Trollope best known for its story about bigamy and Victorian morals. Professor Deborah Denenholz Morse goes beyond the scandal to explore the novel’s deeper concerns with race, identity and the legacy of slavery. She focuses on Ella Peacocke – an American woman whose background is linked to the ruined slave-owning class in post-Civil War Louisiana. Drawing on her wider research into Trollope’s work, Professor Deborah Denenholz Morse places this novel in the context of his travels and changing views about race, class and Englishness.

Professor Deborah Denenholz Morse

Professor Deborah Denenholz Morse served as the inaugural Sara E. Nance Eminent Professor of English at William & Mary from 2017 to 2022 and was twice designated a Plumeri Faculty Excellence Scholar, most recently for 2022–2024. In March 2024, she was appointed the NEH Eminent Professor of English.

Deborah is the author of Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels (1987) and Reforming Trollope: Race, Gender, and Englishness in the Novels of Anthony Trollope (2013). Deborah co-edited The Politics of Gender in the Novels of Anthony Trollope (with Margaret Markwick and Regenia Gagnier, 2009) and The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope (with Margaret Markwick and Mark Turner, 2016). Her most recent articles on Trollope are “Mourning Glencora” in My Victorian Novel (2020), edited by Annette Federico, and “Handling Private Dramas of Class and Gender in Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children” in Victorian Hands: The Manual Turn in Nineteenth-Century Body Studies (2020), edited by Pete Capuano and Sue Zemka.

Dr Wortle’s School was originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine, May-Dec. 1880. First published in book format London, Chapman and Hall, 1881. 2 volumes.

Resources

• Plot summary and character listing for Dr Wortle’s School 
• Download Dr Wortle’s School free of charge from Project Gutenberg