"Before the reader is introduced to the modest country medical practitioner who is to be the chief personage of the following tale, it will be well that he should be made acquainted with some particulars as to the locality in which, and the neighbors among whom, our doctor followed his profession."
This is the opening paragraph of the novel. It is instructive for illustrating the nature of the narrative voice. The conversational tone of the narrative description is maintained throughout. Like many 19th century novels, this one features a third-person narrator who does not disappear as with modern storytelling. Although not explicitly a character actively involved in the action, his is an active presence. Rather than the detached objective storyteller that has been the norm for novels since the beginning of the 20th century, this narrator often sounds, as in this example, as if he is a person in the room telling readers a story with which they have varying levels of familiarity already built in. The opening paragraph also situates how the narrative uses a formality of language that is also period appropriate.
"This was one Scatcherd, a great railway con- tractor, a man who was a native of Barchester, who had bought property in the neighborhood, and who had achieved a sort of popularity there and elsewhere by the violence of his democratic opposition to the aristocracy. According to this man’s political tenets, the Conservatives should be laughed at as fools, but the Whigs should be hated as knaves."
While not technically a political novel or even a novel of social commentary, it is very much that very thing on a certain level. Technically speaking, the story is a family drama involving the secret illegitimacy of a daughter. The illegitimacy is very much literal, but also acts on a metaphorical level so that the narrative also becomes a social critique about the "good blood" of the aristocracy and introduction of democratic ideals into that foundation of the British class system. The fellow with rigid political views under discussion here is known as Sir Roger Scratcherd. One would think, of course, that the title affords him a background of privilege. In reality, he begins his climb upward as a poor stonemason and briefly imprisoned for his part in the death of Dr. Thorne's brother, The novel is to a great extent an analysis of how democratizing the aristocratic system allows such a person to rise to the level of getting elected to Parliament. The narrator is not stingy with his opinions on this clash.
"Was it not within her capacity to do as nobly, to love as truly, to worship her God in heaven with as perfect a faith, and her god on earth with as real a troth, as though blood had descended to her purely through scores of purely born progenitors?"
The "her" being spoken of here is Mary, that illegitimate offspring. The narrator here is penetrating into her mind and expressing her thoughts directly to the reader. This quote is just one small section of a very long and very dense paragraph. All of which essentially boils down to this paragraph asking the question of should one suffer the fate of systemic denial simply because one parent was not married to the other. The issue of illegitimacy runs deeply through British literature precisely because legitimacy is such a core component of the legalities of aristocracy. Even one of the titles of the Harry Potter series speaks to this foundational significance. Half-bloods are a staple of dramatic conflicts throughout the entirety of Brit lit. And yet, each of these characters are repeatedly asking the very same question Mary is posing in this passage in which the answer is always that the legitimacy of birth logically should have nothing at all to do with the quality of the offspring. It is the rejection of that logic which dictates the divergence between aristocracies and democracies. The novel is, on a deeper level, an examination of the intellectual choice that goes into either accepting or rejecting this logic.
