This late and still understudied work is unusual in Trollope’s oeuvre in that it deploys a first-person narrator-and an unreliable one at that. This community, living a hundred years in the future, claims to be autonomous, but it possesses a mindset still governed by a sense of Britain as the “mother country.” Hence Trollope emphasizes how difficult it is for settler societies to shake off such attitudes and ties.Īnthony Trollope’s short novel, The Fixed Period, was written between December 1880 and February 1881, serialized in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from October 1881 to March 1882, and published in volume form in the latter month. Drawing on the history of cricket matches between England and its antipodean colonies around the time of the novel’s composition, I argue that the cricketing interlude serves to highlight the text’s take on the Britannulans. My article aims to explain an odd interlude in the novel: a cricket match in Britannula between a local and an English team. It deals with a policy of compulsory euthanasia in the politically independent island of Britannula, a policy that is overturned when the island is taken over by Britain. Anthony Trollope’s late novel The Fixed Period (1882), set a century in the future in a fictional South Pacific island, has often puzzled readers.
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