Politics as soap opera . . . then and now

Though Trollope's Palliser novels, the fifth of which I've been reading this week, draw their cast of characters from Parliament, its Members and the various Ministers who make up successive governments, the books are ultimately far less about politics than they are about the society and culture that grow up around politics. Trollope's focus is on the members of society rather than its problems, and while political issues do arise in the novels, the important votes and debates to which they give rise are far more likely to be hinges of plot than occasions for deeper thought.

In that sense, Trollope's account of the political life of his time isn't all that unlike our experience of our own politics: though I'll admit to flat-out enjoying the soap opera aspect of politics, I'm at least a casual policy wonk, and this speech from Lady Glencora, Duchess of Omnium and wife of Prime Minister Palliser, sounds distressingly familiar, almost as if it could have come from the mouth of a Sunday morning talk host today:

Of course I don't mean about politics. Of course it must be a mixed kind of thign at first, and I don't care a straw whetehr it run to Radicalism or Toryism. The country goes on its own way, eithe for better or for worse, which ever of them are in. I don't think it makes any difference as to what sort of laws are passed. But among ourselves, in our set, it makes a deal of difference who gets the garters, and the counties, who are made barons and then earls, and whose name stands at the head of everything.

Thus, I suppose, has it always been, frustrating as that may be.