Ballycloran itself, with its down-at-heel occupants, typifies allegorically, with sustained power and rugged picturesqueness, the agricultural and pastoral Ireland which Trollope had seen and studied in all its varieties. Less indomitably idle than his drivelling father had always been, as well as in all respects a better man, Thady might have been trained to a life of family and national service. His habitually dormant powers might at any time have been roused to vigorous, fruitful action but for the deadening and demoralising influence of his environment. Innocent and ignorant of the sins of cities, he was comparatively free from the commonest vices of the country. Father Mathew’s mission had not yet inflamed the Irish peasantry with a passion for temperance; but without any such teaching, Thady Macdermot had never fallen a victim to strong drink. His chief enemy was his own temperament, which, when we first meet him, it is clear may, in some unforeseen conditions, be suddenly and dangerously kindled into ferocious passion. Less from any words escaping him on the subject than his habitual air of sullen and silent preoccupation do we know that he thinks of little else than his own decadence from his forefathers. He had always felt that his family was sinking lower and lower daily, without finding it in him to arrest the process for the future, or move a finger in repairing the ruin of the past. Therefore he had only become more gloomy, more tyrannical. His one companion and his only resource is his pipe, his one employment to fill and refill it. Into such a lot neither pleasure nor excitement could enter, and, especially for a Celt, Trollope would have his readers feel, that way madness lies.
Thus, through the gradual development of the plot, we know instinctively that some Nemesis will declare itself on an existence which has lost the force or the desire to rise out of an atmosphere whose slow poison has stunted and deformed its growth. In its joylessness as well as in its decline from the better fortunes of earlier days, the picture of Ballycloran not only reflected the prevailing depression, agricultural and industrial, of the country, but harmonised with the lamentations from fashionable lips over the final eclipse of the gaiety of its capital. Irish society leaders of the good old days, when the sporting season did not keep them to their castles in Connaught or Ulster, used on a grand scale to keep up their houses in Fitzwilliam or Merrion Square in their native metropolis. All that had gone. Huge, overgrown, vulgar London had snuffed out select, elegant, and refined Dublin, whose stately quadrangles and picturesque avenues were deserted by their proper occupants for some spick-and-span new mansions which stared one out of countenance in Tyburnia, or some more modest tenement in a dingy angle of Mayfair. The glories of the Viceregal Court had long since begun to pale. The impatiently waited royal visits that it was hoped might bring compensation were as yet repeatedly delayed. In this way the fair city on the Liffey had been largely shorn of its attractions and pleasures, just as the rich soil of the surrounding country was impoverished by ignorance and neglect. Some hint of this formed the minor key in Trollope’s powerful and pathetic dirge over the progressive extinction of the family lamps at Ballycloran. In certain details, therefore, as well as in general idea, the Macdermots formed the microcosm of an entire people. Its genius, always feminised as Erin, is appropriately personified by the daughter of the ill-starred house, on the common ruin of whose members the curtain falls. Trollope’s Irish experiences, as has been already said, gave him some acquaintance with the Young Ireland movement, and its combined appeals to the patriotic and romantic sensibilities, as well as to the cupidity, of a populace readily lending itself to the wiles of skilled agitators.