Set in the 1850s, The Three Clerks exposes and probes the relationships between three clerks and the three sisters who became their wives. At the same time it satirizes the Civil Service examinations and financial corruption in dealings on the stock market.

         The story of the three clerks and the three sisters who become their wives shows Trollope probing and exposing relationships with natural sympathy and insight before the fuller triumphs of Barchester, the political novels, and The Way We Live Now. The novel is imbued with autobiographical warmth and immediacy, the ironic appraisal of politics and society deftly balanced by romantic and domestic pathos and tribulation. The unscrupulous wheeling and dealing of Undy Scott is colourfully offset by the first appearance in Trollope’s fiction of the bullying, eccentric, and compelling lawyer Mr Chaffanbrass.