The Bertrams
1859
Two Oxford friends, two exam results, two fates. George Bertram returns from his finals crowned with a double-first, the university's supreme validation. Arthur Wilkinson receives a second-class degree, a quiet catastrophe that will shadow everything that follows. What begins as friendly rivalry becomes something far more corrosive: a study in how success breeds arrogance while failure breeds resignation, how society measures worth in degrees and guineas, and how even love cannot survive the wound of feeling diminished. Trollope follows both men into the world, through London's literary circles, the tepid respectability of the spa town Littlebath, and on a contentious journey to the Levant where colonial ambition collides with religious doubt. The Bertrams is a novel about early disillusion, about watching promising young men discover that the world has already decided their worth before they've begun to live.
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“Perhaps I may do something by writing,' said Charley, very bashfully. 'By writing! ha, ha, ha,' and Alaric laughed somewhat cruelly at the poor navvy”
— Anthony Trollope
“So also to Sir Robert Peel was Catholic Emancipation horrible, so was Reform of Parliament, so was the Corn Law Repeal. They were horrible to him, horrible to be thought of, horrible to be expressed. But the people required these measures, and therefore he carried them, arguing on their behalf with all the astuteness of a practised statesman.””
— Anthony Trollope
