‘Marion Fay’ is half tragedy, and half romantic burlesque. The novel contrasts two love stories, each involving an aristocrat and a commoner. The subversive Lord Hampstead's jump into middle-class society in his fervent pursuit of Marion Fay, a Quaker and daughter of a City clerk, is balanced by the testing of his radical friend George Roden, a clerk in the General Post Office, whose weird experiences among the aristocracy during his courtship of Hampstead's sister Lady Frances Trafford, are employed to satirize the concept of rank. Trollope vividly evokes stupid working lives, plain homes, blank streets, and limited horizons of the inhabitants in Paradise Row, using them as an ironic choric commentary on the unattainable world of rank, wealth, and freedom, symbolized by life in the wonderful country houses.