Dr Wortle's School

Mr. Peacocke, a classical scholar, has come to Broughtonshire with his beautiful American wife to live as a schoolmaster. Then a "rummy looking fellow" appears at the school gates to blackmail them with the assertion that Mrs. Peacocke's first husband -- a reprobate from Louisiana -- is still alive, and the county is scandalized. In the character of Dr. Wortle, the combative but warmhearted headmaster, who takes the couple's part in the face of general ostracism, there is an element of autobiography. There are echoes, too, in Wortle's gallantry to Mrs. Peacocke, of Trollope's own attachment to the vivacious Bostonian, Kate Field. With its scathing depiction of American manhood, its jousting with convention, and its amiable, egotistical protagonist, Dr. Wortle's School is one of the sharpest and most engaging of Trollope's later novels.