The Vicar of Bullhampton

The Vicar of Bullhampton is an 1870 novel by Anthony Trollope. It is made up of three intertwining subplots: the courtship of a young woman by two suitors; a feud between the titular Broad church vicar and a Low church nobleman, abetted by a Methodist minister; and the vicar's attempt to rehabilitate a young woman who has gone astray. Trollope expected his depiction of a fallen woman to be controversial, and unusually for him wrote a preface defending it. But the anticipated controversy never materialised, and contemporary reviewers tended to ignore that subplot, focussing instead on the courtship in the novel. Reviews were generally less than positive; many reviewers and readers who had acquired a taste for Trollope from the 1850s-60s Barchester novels were unhappy about the darker tone of later novels such as this one. Trollope's fortunes suffered because of the mode of the novel's publication. Owing to mismanagement by the publishers, it was not serialised in a popular magazine, as originally intended. Instead, it was issued as monthly numbers, a form of serialisation that had become unpopular with the reading public, and Trollope lost readers as a result.