Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) is the sixth and final novel in the Chronicles of Barsetshire — the book Trollope himself called "the best novel I have written." It brings the whole imagined county to its close, and gathers the people of the earlier chronicles for one last, unforgettable story.

The Reverend Josiah Crawley, perpetual curate of the wretched parish of Hogglestock, is a learned, proud, desperately poor man with a large family and an income that cannot feed them. When he pays a debt with a cheque for twenty pounds, the cheque is traced to another man — and Crawley cannot remember how it came into his hands. He is charged with theft, committed for trial, and half the county, led by the formidable Mrs. Proudie, decides that a clergyman has stolen. Whether he took it, and how the truth at last emerges, Trollope keeps in suspense almost to the final page.

Around this central agony he braids the threads of the entire series: his daughter Grace's love for the proud archdeacon's son; the long, sad courtship of Lily Dale and Johnny Eames; the war in the bishop's palace and the famous death of Mrs. Proudie. At its heart stands Crawley — by common consent Trollope's greatest tragic figure, a man almost mad with the humiliation of genteel poverty, both innocent and unable to prove it. Beneath the mystery lies a profound study of pride, poverty, and justice, and over the whole book hangs the elegiac weight of a great novelist taking his leave of the country he had made.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1867 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.