The Three Clerks (The ^AWorld's Classics)

This is Trollipe's first important commentary on the contemporary scene. Set in the 1850s, it satirizes the recently instituted Civil Service examinations and financial corruption in dealings on the stock market. The story of the three clerks and the three sisters who became their wives shows Trollope probing and exposing relationships with natural sympathy and insight long before "The Barchester Chronicles" and his political novels.