Is He Popenjoy?'s bitter critique of society

Ellen Moody

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[This document is a note to the author's Trollope's Comfort Romances for Men: Heterosexual Male Heroism in his Work — GPL.]

In Is He Popenjoy?, which mounts a bitter critique against society, Trollope reveals how what is admired or accepted as manly conflicts with happiness for anyone and easily leads to impoverished impotence for those caught in their power. Yet the novel is not caricature or "exaggerated" satire in the manner of The Way We Live Now. Its mode is realistic and indirect. Nonetheless, it was subject to a continual bowdlerization and censorship by Dickens's son; see T. C. D.'s "Victorian Editions and Victorian Delicacy;" Sutherland records many of the changes in the notes to the Oxford edition, 317-35.

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Last modified 9 August 2006