Phineas Finn

An Irish barrister with no money is returned for a pocket borough and finds Westminster is run by men who expect him to vote as he is told. Trollope stood for Parliament himself while the novel was being serialised, and lost, expensively; he put the whole apparatus of the lobby, the club and the country house into the second Palliser novel. Two women want Phineas, and both know what politics costs. Forty-two plates of coaching inns, posting houses and railway directors by Abraham Solomon and Charles Cooper Henderson give the novel's world of travel, electioneering and club life its period face.