Anthony Trollope's The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870) is among the bravest novels of its century — a story whose true centre is a character Victorian fiction was supposed to keep off the stage entirely: a 'fallen woman.' So conscious was Trollope of the risk that he prefixed the book with a rare preface defending himself, and putting to his readers a question the whole novel asks: 'Cannot women, who are good, pity the sufferings of the vicious, and do something perhaps to mitigate and shorten them, without contamination from the vice?'

In the Wiltshire village of Bullhampton, the warm-hearted, combative parson Frank Fenwick refuses to abandon two of his parishioners whom the world has condemned. One is Sam Brattle, the miller's headstrong son, arrested on suspicion of a brutal murder. The other, and the heart of the book, is Sam's sister Carry Brattle — once the prettiest girl in the parish, now a 'castaway' who has been seduced, has hidden herself in London, and has been cast out of decent society and nearly out of her own father's heart. Fenwick sets himself to clear Sam's name and to bring Carry home — against the granite refusal of old Jacob Brattle, the miller, who cannot forgive his daughter her shame.

Around this runs a marriage plot of unusual delicacy — Mary Lowther, torn between the good squire Harry Gilmore, whom she cannot love, and her penniless cousin Captain Walter Marrable, whom she does — and a great comic feud, as the spiteful Marquis of Trowbridge has a Dissenting chapel built at the vicarage gate to plague the vicar he has come to hate. With his interwoven plots, his unhurried compassionate realism, and a moral directness rare even in him, Trollope makes of a single village a sustained plea for mercy against the cruel verdict of the world — insisting that a fallen woman's misery is 'worthy of alleviation, as is every misery to which humanity is subject.'

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1870 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.