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- Herausgeber: Quickie Classics
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In The Fixed Period, Trollope imagines the future republic of Britannula, where a reforming president, John Neverbend, enacts a law mandating compulsory retirement at sixty-seven and a year of sequestration before humane death at sixty-eight. Narrated by Neverbend in an earnest, self-justifying voice, the novel blends political debate, parliamentary procedure, and domestic comedy into a coolly ironical dystopia set in 1980. Its satire probes utilitarian calculations, the rhetoric of progress, colonial self-confidence, and the sentimental claims of friendship, culminating in a dramatic imperial intervention that tests the limits of technocratic governance and humane intention. Written late in Anthony Trollope's career, the book extends the concerns of a novelist famed for Barsetshire and parliamentary fiction into speculative terrain. A veteran civil servant and indefatigable traveler, Trollope knew colonial societies firsthand and observed debates on scientific administration, aging, and euthanasia; those experiences and his skepticism toward reductive utilitarianism shape the novel's tonal mix of sympathy and scrutiny. Recommended to readers of Swift and Butler as well as early science fiction, The Fixed Period offers a concise, unsettling meditation on progress and pity, ideal for courses in Victorian studies, bioethics, political thought, and utopian-dystopian literature. Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable—distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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The Fixed Period (Summarized Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
Balancing the tidy calculus of reform against the unruly claims of affection, The Fixed Period imagines a community that turns the clock of progress into a moral metronome, proposing that lives should culminate at a scheduled age for the sake of order, economy, and civic virtue, and then follows the shiver that runs through institutions, friendships, and families when the public good demands that the private heart keep time, asking with cool persistence how far rational planning may trespass upon human dignity before progress becomes a euphemism for coercion and compassion must decide whether to obey or resist.
Published in 1882, late in Anthony Trollope’s career, this short novel belongs to the Victorian strain of speculative satire that glances toward science fiction while remaining rooted in political and social observation. Its setting is a small, self-governing republic in the South Pacific, imagined as an experiment in enlightened administration at a remove from the old world. The book stands apart from Trollope’s better-known English chronicles by exporting his fascination with institutions and character into a future-leaning scenario, using the apparatus of a utopian project gone awry to test the limits of reformist ideals within a compact, carefully reasoned narrative.
The premise is audacious yet disarmingly orderly: the nation adopts a law establishing a fixed age at which every citizen must enter a period of honored retirement followed by a humane, compulsory end, intended to preserve dignity and relieve society of what reformers call the burdens of decline. Trollope presents this through a first-person account by the nation’s elected leader, whose confidence in the statute’s wisdom frames the story. The voice is measured, persuasive, and often wry, inviting readers into debates, meetings, and domestic conversations that chart how a theoretical policy presses upon daily life without resorting to melodrama or sensationalism.
As the scheme moves from statute book to lived experience, the novel probes issues that still trouble political philosophy: whether utility can outrank conscience, whether the state may compel for the supposed good, and whether equality before the law can ever account for the singularity of a life. Generational anxieties animate the pages, with vigor and dependency, legacy and loss, weighed under the cool pressure of administrative logic. The narrative’s power lies in its steady exposure of the gap between procedural neatness and human complexity, where affection, fear, ambition, and pride contest the meaning of dignity, duty, and care.
Stylistically, readers will recognize Trollope’s patience with argument and his knack for revealing character through conversation, here sharpened by the speculative frame. The tone oscillates between earnest civic seriousness and a gently satiric edge, allowing principles to be examined without caricature. The imagined future is close enough to the author’s own world to keep technology and institutions familiar, yet distant enough to let the extraordinary policy feel conceivable. The result is an atmosphere of plausible bureaucracy rather than exotic futurism, in which committee rooms, newspapers, and domestic parlors become the arenas where ideology shows its seams and sentiment asserts itself.
For contemporary readers, the book’s questions resonate amid debates over assisted dying, age-based policy, resource allocation, and the ethics of technocratic governance. It offers a compact study of how data-friendly arguments can drift toward managerial cruelty, and how public language can anesthetize private pain. The spectacle of a confident reformer trusting procedure to solve mortality speaks directly to eras enamored of metrics and models. Without preaching, Trollope shows how good intentions, constitutional forms, and sincere patriotism can converge on outcomes that unsettle our deepest intuitions about care, consent, and autonomy, making the novel a sharp companion to modern policy disputes.
Approached as both satire and thought experiment, The Fixed Period rewards patient attention to its careful rhetoric and slow-blooming emotional stakes. It is not a novel of dramatic twists so much as of accumulating recognitions, where each conversation slightly reweights the scales of reason and sympathy. Readers will find a compact, provocative book that challenges them to test their own principles against a tidy-sounding law. By the end, what lingers is not a verdict but a heightened sensitivity to the words we use about age and usefulness, and a renewed caution toward any reform that treats persons as schedules.
Synopsis
Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period is a late-career dystopian satire set in an imagined near future from the author’s vantage. The story unfolds in a small, self-governing island republic in the South Pacific, where modern political confidence meets a radical social experiment. The narrator is the nation’s elected president, a conscientious reformer who believes reason can perfect civic life. Through his account, Trollope presents a polity proud of its orderliness, debating clubs, and efficient laws, and then introduces the legislation that gives the book its title—an audacious attempt to regulate the end of life for the alleged benefit of both the individual and the state.
The “fixed period” is a statute that sets a precise age at which citizens must withdraw from ordinary society for a final year of seclusion in a purpose-built residence, after which their lives will be brought to a painless close. Presented as humane, rational, and economically prudent, the policy promises dignity for the aging, relief for heirs, and savings for the commonwealth. Trollope traces the law’s careful framing—its schedules, registries, and solemn ceremonies—alongside the president’s fervent conviction that enlightened planning can remove fear and inefficiency from the most difficult passage of human existence.
From the moment the law is enacted, debate consumes the republic. Civic clubs, newspapers, and pulpits argue whether any government may mandate an individual’s final day. Supporters invoke progress, public duty, and planned welfare; opponents appeal to conscience, religion, and personal liberty. Trollope keeps the tone measured yet incisive, sketching editorials, speeches, and dinner-table conversations that reveal a society simultaneously proud of reform and uneasy about the boundary between care and coercion. As the new institution is built and officials appointed, the abstract principle becomes a practical timetable, and the populace confronts what it will mean in actual lives.
The first scheduled subject is the president’s longtime friend, a prosperous and respected citizen chosen to set a public example. Personal intimacy collides with political consistency as this man’s date approaches. Families plead, and calculations of inheritance are whispered about, while record-keeping and age certificates suddenly take on life-or-death significance. Trollope tightens the focus on the friend’s wavering acceptance, the president’s anxious resolve, and the younger generation’s reactions—including a tender romance that links the two households—so that private loyalties and public law become inseparable in the unfolding crisis.
Administrative machinery grinds forward: committees meet, officers are sworn, and the residence prepares to receive its first occupant with civic solemnity. The president drafts proclamations and conducts tours, appealing to reason and honor to keep the nation steady. Yet the security forces hesitate to act against neighbors, and legal niceties multiply. Trollope uses these procedural scenes to expose how elegant theories depend on fallible registrars, on-the-spot judgments, and the unpredictable responses of ordinary people who must carry out the state’s most intimate directive.
News of the statute spreads beyond the island, drawing sharp attention from the wider world, especially from the great power with historical ties to the republic. Editorials abroad question both the morality of compulsory ending and the self-determination of a small community experimenting at the frontier of social policy. Rumors circulate of a warship’s arrival and diplomatic messages urging reconsideration. The president answers with confident essays on national sovereignty and the civilizing mission of rational law, even as the prospect of external scrutiny raises the stakes for the impending first enforcement.
As the appointed day nears, the novel becomes a contest of speeches, petitions, and conscience-stricken conversations. The president argues that compassion can be systematically organized, that burdens need not linger into incapacity, and that a courageous people can face mortality without superstition. His detractors insist that compassion must remain voluntary, that the worth of a person cannot be fixed by statute, and that love and duty confound tidy arithmetic. The friend at the center of the law embodies this conflict, wanting to be loyal to a civic ideal while recoiling from an irreversible command.
The dramatic tension culminates in preparations to escort the first subject to the residence. Crowds gather, private appeals arrive at the last moment, and procedural steps become ethically fraught. Trollope’s narration remains calm and observant, noting how public excitement and personal dread interact: some call for mercy, others for firmness; officials measure each action against both legal texts and the unpredictable reaction of the citizenry. Without resorting to melodrama, the novel shows how a measure devised to remove uncertainty from life’s end instead reveals how complex, relational, and contingent that passage really is.
The Fixed Period stands as an early meditation on state power over life and death, the seductions of technocratic reform, and the limits of utilitarian planning. By staging a humane intention pushed to its logical extreme, Trollope probes who should decide when a life has run its course and whether a community can be truly rational about mortality. The outcome turns on political, personal, and international pressures, but the book’s enduring significance lies in its questions rather than any verdict. It anticipates modern debates on euthanasia, elder care, and sovereignty, inviting readers to weigh compassion against coercion with sober care.
