Anthony Trollope's Doctor Thorne (1858) is the third of the six Chronicles of Barsetshire and, for many readers, the most beloved of them all — the warmest, most romantic, and most satisfying of the series. It moves out of the cathedral city of the earlier books and into the green English county itself, to the village of Greshamsbury, the debt-ridden estate of its squire, and the quiet country physician whose plain decency anchors the whole tale.

Frank Gresham, the only son and heir of Greshamsbury, has loved Mary Thorne, the doctor's niece, since they were children. But the estate is sinking under debt, and Frank's proud mother and her grand relations have one commandment for him: he must marry money. Mary has none — and, the world believes, no birth either, for she is illegitimate, a secret Doctor Thorne has guarded all her life. What no one knows is that the immense fortune of the dying, hard-drinking railway baronet Sir Roger Scatcherd is bound by his will to fall, should his dissolute son die, to Mary herself.

Trollope tells it all in the most companionable voice in English fiction — a wise, amused, candid narrator who confides in the reader, refuses to trade in cheap suspense, and lets the pleasure lie in the slow, sure working-out of debts, deaths, and a young man's constancy. Beneath the romance lies one of his sharpest inquiries into what gives a person worth: the Greshams have ancient blood and no money, the Scatcherds vast money and no breeding, and Mary Thorne, who has neither, is plainly the finest creature in the book. It is a long, generous, deeply humane novel, and an ideal place to begin reading Trollope.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1858 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.