Character and the Career: Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn and the rhetoric of the Victorian State

In Victorian Britain, the consolidation of capitalism and the absence of bureaucracy had a huge and unsettling impact on politics and culture. This paper argues that the Victorian novelist, like the public moralist, provided a solution to this crisis by forming a construction of the individual as a rational and emotional citizen and of a state adequately representing this citizen. The study’s objective is to examine the details of this construction in Phineas Finn (1869), a novel by Anthony Trollope (1815–1882); it identifies, analyzes and interprets the discourses of subject formation, politics, and character. The method used draws on the work of Paul de Man and is inductive, descriptive and rhetorical.