The 19th-century English novelist Anthony Trollope created no small number of Jewish characters, many but not all of them portrayed in an unflattering light. Ann Marlow attributes Trollope’s interest in Jews to his own insecurity as a member of a poor but genteel family who spent much of his life struggling to improve his financial situation:
[T]here is nasty anti-Semitism in Trollope’s depictions of Jews, but there is also identification. . . . In Phineas Redux (1873), the gallant Madame Marie Max Goesler (the widow of a Jew, if not definitely Jewish herself) faces off against the evil Dr. Emilius, saving the politician Phineas Finn from the gallows—and ends by becoming his second wife. One critic, Shirley Letwin, has argued that Madame Goesler is actually the most perfect “gentleman” in Trollope. . . .
[F]or Trollope, the profession of writing novels involved at least one stereotypical Jewish trait. In The Prime Minister, . . . the upright old gentleman Mr. Wharton refuses to allow the marriage of his daughter to the evil Ferdinand Lopez, a Jew. Trollope comments editorially that the world no longer cared whether men had “the fair skin and bold eyes and uncertain words of an English gentleman or the swarthy color and false grimace and glib tongue of some inferior Latin race.” Professionally, Trollope certainly is with the people of the glib tongue, not the stammering gentlefolk. There is perhaps no 19th-century English novelist as “glib” as Trollope. . . .
As [his] autobiography makes clear, the young Trollope had come close to falling off the class ladder. . . . For Trollope, Jews stand outside the inherited social order, creating themselves by their work—much as he did, and as he was half-ashamed, half-proud of doing.
Read more on Tablet: http://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/190465/anthony-trollope-bicentennial