Is He Popenjoy ?

The question that haunts this novel is simple yet devastating: is he Popenjoy? Lord George Germain, a respectable but somewhat dim younger son, has built his entire future on an assumption. His elder brother, the dissolute Marquis of Brotherton, resides in Italy, sowing wild oats with no legitimate heir in sight. George's comfortable expectations collapse when a letter arrives announcing the Marquis's late marriage to an Italian widow and the birth of a son. If the child is legitimate, George is displaced entirely. If not, the title and estate may remain within reach. But proving illegitimacy across international borders, through foreign courts and Catholic canon law, proves nearly impossible. Trollope transforms a comedy of manners into something darker. The social niceties of English country life crack under the strain of greed, anxiety, and moral compromise. George's wife, especially, reveals surprising depths of ambition and ruthlessness beneath her genteel exterior. The novel asks what happens when a man's entire identity rests on an accident of birth he never earned.