Round this main episode is clustered another series of events, connecting the vicar with his parish. These furnish some of the best scenes in the book as well as serve to introduce the same kind of melodramatic element, first noticeable in _Dr. Thorne_, afterwards receiving greater prominence in _Orley Farm_. Thus did Trollope practically acknowledge the influence upon the novel-reading public now firmly exercised by experts in sensational effects like Mrs. Henry Wood, Wilkie Collins, and Miss Braddon. Among the Bullhampton vicar’s parishioners are an unbending old miller, his daughter Carry, who has gone wrong, and his ne’er-do-well son, Sam Brattle, now under suspicion for a murder committed in the village. The Brattles are therefore an undesirable family. So thinks the Marquis of Trowbridge, the landlord of the murdered man. They happen to be tenants of Gilmore, who, meeting one day at the vicarage Lord Trowbridge, is asked point blank to clear his property of them. Here the vicar himself intervenes, turning on the Marquis with sharp words for his uncharitable and inexcusable demand. Lord Trowbridge, a pompous brainless peer, puffed up with the sense of his extreme importance, is for the moment too much overwhelmed by the parson’s audacity to say anything.
Presently, however, his feeling of offended dignity takes practical shape and prepares vengeance in giving a plot of ground, exactly opposite the parsonage gates, as the site for a Primitive Methodist Chapel, to the local minister of that sect, one Puddleham. This territorial donation soon proves to be not Trowbridge property at all. As a part of the glebe land it is at the vicar’s exclusive disposal. The Marquis, therefore, now suffers the further mortification of being compelled to make a full apology to Fenwick for the infringement of his rights, as well as to pull down so much of the chapel as has been already built. All of this conclusively proves, to Trollope’s naïvely undisguised satisfaction, that Providence is on the side of the State Church. The sooner, therefore, Defoe’s _The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_ is literally adopted, the better for the peace, purity, and morals of the community. The same retributive poetical justice that deals so sharply with the Puddlehamites, with all poachers on the establishment’s preserves, and with their patron who wears the Trowbridge title, now befriends the Brattles. Sam turns out to be innocent; poor Carry, if she cannot regain her innocence, displays qualities which at least secure sympathy, and is prevented from falling over the rock of ruin to the lowest depth of degradation. The sturdy, hot-tempered old atheist, her father does not recant his theological heresies, but at least compares favourably with an evangelical Nonconformist.