Unnatural self- sacrifice

In this essay I explore Trollope's challenge to traditional Victorian valorizations of sacrifice. A wide range of Victorian writings, from novels to sermons to economic and sociological treatises, suggests that sacrifice is virtuous only when it comes without personal reward. In an era of unprecedented personal and national prosperity, Trollope rejected this purist standard for sacrifice. The first and last novels of his Barsetshire series do away with the attempt to retain a sphere of sacrifice beyond a capitalistic circuit of exchange where theft and questionably gained surplus consistently threaten ethical life. Instead, the novels allow morally desirable acts to reap reward for their agents, to generate various forms of surplus that can then be fed back into a circuit of sympathetic human relations. In rejecting a sacrificial ideal, Trollope poses an everyday communal ethic of benefit in place of the idealized, highly individualistic model of self-denial that so many of his contemporaries endorsed.