Professor Steven Amarnick introduces The Duke’s Children and also discusses the restoration of the text. Professor Amarnick painstakingly reviewed Trollope’s original manuscript of the novel, restoring 65,000 words that Trollope had been made to cut for its original publication in All The Year Round, Oct. 4, 1879-July 24, 1880.

Prof. Steven Amarnick joined the Kingsborough English Department in the fall of 2000. He teaches freshman composition, developmental, and literature courses. Prof. Amarnick has written widely on the work of British novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) and curated an exhibit, “Anthony Trollope: The Art of Modesty,” at NYU’s Fales Library. Soon after coming to Kingsborough, he received a PSC-CUNY grant to study The Duke’s Children, the final novel in Trollope’s famed Palliser series. Though his intention at the time was merely to write an article about the heavily edited, thousand-page manuscript, Prof. Amarnick came to see that the cuts Trollope was forced to make by his publisher severely damaged the novel, and that it was possible to figure out what Trollope’s intentions were. With the help of two assistants, Prof. Amarnick has done the painstaking, and immensely satisfying, work of reconstruction, adding two hundred pages of “new” material to the book. The Duke’s Children: First Complete Edition, was published in spring 2015 by the Folio Society–in time for Trollope’s bicentenary.

We are reading the restored text of the first complete edition, which is available in several editions:

• Folio Society, published 2015
• Everyman’s Library, published 2017
• Oxford World’s Classics, published 2020

Resources

• Plot summary and character listing for The Duke’s Children
• Download The Duke’s Children free of charge from Project Gutenberg (Note this is not the restored text)
• The Duke’s Children Restored First Complete Edition – Explanatory notes