The Kellys and the O'Kellys

Two Irish courtships and one attempted murder: a young lord who needs an heiress, and an innkeeper's son who courts a plain heiress — whose brother would rather see her dead than let her money go. Trollope worked for the Post Office in Ireland for eighteen years and set his second novel there; the trial scene came out of assizes he had attended, and the Ireland in it is the one he lived in rather than the one England was reading about. Fifty-six plates of Irish and Scottish life, from Erskine Nicol and David Wilkie, picture the tenants, beggars and preachers of the world Trollope knew at first hand.