This island had, thirty years earlier, been settled by a few hundred people who had left New Zealand in protest at that country’s proposals about public debt.īy 1980, New Zealand, Britannula, and Australia were all independent of Britain-Britannula, from its inception-but the story relates how Britain has forcibly taken control of Britannula, on account of the latter’s distinctive policy of the “Fixed Period.” The policy mandates that, because old age both makes people suffer and may prolong their service in roles they can no longer fulfil effectively, euthanasia is compulsory. Moreover, rather than being set in Trollope’s England, the story told in The Fixed Period asks readers to look a century into the future, to 1980, and to imagine an island called Britannula in the Pacific Ocean.
This late and still understudied work is unusual in Trollope’s oeuvre in that it deploys a first-person narrator-and an unreliable one at that. This community, living a hundred years in the future, claims to be autonomous, but it possesses a mindset still governed by a sense of Britain as the “mother country.” Hence Trollope emphasizes how difficult it is for settler societies to shake off such attitudes and ties.Īnthony Trollope’s short novel, The Fixed Period, was written between December 1880 and February 1881, serialized in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from October 1881 to March 1882, and published in volume form in the latter month. Drawing on the history of cricket matches between England and its antipodean colonies around the time of the novel’s composition, I argue that the cricketing interlude serves to highlight the text’s take on the Britannulans. My article aims to explain an odd interlude in the novel: a cricket match in Britannula between a local and an English team.
It deals with a policy of compulsory euthanasia in the politically independent island of Britannula, a policy that is overturned when the island is taken over by Britain. Anthony Trollope’s late novel The Fixed Period (1882), set a century in the future in a fictional South Pacific island, has often puzzled readers.
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