Although not one of Trollope's better-known works, it is notable for its depictions of rural English life and for its many detailed fox hunting scenes.
In its anti-heroine, Arabella Trefoil, it presents a scathing but ultimately sympathetic portrayal of a woman who has abandoned virtually all scruples in her quest for a husband.
Her stepmother is from a lower social order; believing it best for Mary, she pressures her strongly to accept a proposal from Lawrence Twentyman, a prosperous young yeoman farmer with aspirations to gentility.
At Lady Augustus's direction, Arabella has spent many years struggling to secure a rich husband who will give her and her mother high social standing, an assured income, and a house of their own.
Through his often-tactless remarks in conversation, through his letters to a friend in America, and through a lecture in London titled "The Irrationality of Englishmen", he comments on British justice and government, the Church of England, the custom of primogeniture, and other aspects of English life.
In Senator Gotobed, Trollope employs a device similar to that used by Montesquieu in the Lettres Persanes and by Goldsmith in The Citizen of the World.
Gotobed finds much at fault with his host country: the sale of livings in the Church of England, the sale of commissions in the British army, the custom of primogeniture, the unelected hereditary House of Lords and the lack of proportional representation in the House of Commons, and a system that defers to the wealthy and titled at the expense of justice to those of lower social standing.
[2]: 64 Late in 1876, Trollope wrote: "[Gotobed] is a thoroughly honest man wishing to do good, and is not himself half so absurd as the things which he criticises.
The dishonest politician was a stock figure in American novels of the time; and Trollope himself had noted the ubiquity of corruption on his postal mission to Washington in 1868.
[4]: 227–8 Yet Gotobed is an honourable man, and Trollope apparently tried to avoid making a caricature of him, notwithstanding a few quaint Americanisms and episodes of tobacco-chewing.
In Ruth apRoberts' words, "The Senator is too much the rationalist ever to enjoy something he could not think he understood; and Trollope is too much the empiricist to deny the existence of his joy or his sure sense of its beneficence.
When Reginald Morton, as the new squire, takes up residence at Bragton, the long decline shows signs of coming to an end.
There is a physical and moral contrast between them: Mary is dark, honest, and sincere; Arabella is blonde, embellished with pearl powder, paint, and false hair, and insincere.
A few months later, he wrote: "I have known the woman... all the traits, all the cleverness, all the patience, all the courage, all the self-abnegation,—and all the failure... Will such a one as Arabella Trefoil be damned, and if so why?
"[12] Arabella has been badly schooled by her mother; Mary was more fortunate in having been raised by Lady Ushant of the Morton family, who taught her principles that allowed her to resist her stepmother's mercenary urgings.
[15] Her own reward for this long arduous struggle is a scant one: after Arabella's wedding, "[s]he knew she was an old woman, without money, without blood, and without attraction, whom nobody would ever desire to see.
The critics have to come, and they will tell me that she is unwomanly, unnatural, turgid,—the creation of a morbid imagination, striving after effect by laboured abominations.
Lacking a secure home with her father and stepmother, she was forced to resort to a "sterile round of English visits" and endured several "abortive engagements".
[22] More fortunate in matrimony than Arabella, Bice Trollope found a wealthy and well-connected husband in Charles Stuart-Wortley, whom she married in 1880 at the age of 27.
British reviewers, even those who regarded the book favourably, almost universally felt that Senator Gotobed and his criticisms would have been better left out of the novel.
[20]: 424–5 [26] Some reviewers felt that Trollope was growing embittered: a notice in The Examiner suggested that the author was suffering an "attack of misanthropy" and accused him of maintaining a "special inkstand supplied with gall, for use when describing fashionable society, against which his rancour appears to be unbounded.
"[29] More recent critics have found more sympathy for her plight: James Pope-Hennessy calls her "the finest, most fearless and the most tragic of all [Trollope's] doomed and desperate anti-heroines".