From Ellen Moody, Trollope on the Net, Chapter 6:

Trollope's illustrators all depict inward psychological journeys. They all also visualise many commonplace yet important and ordinary moments in life that can pass fleetingly and leave no obvious trace. In many of these (too many to distinguish), Trollope's characters are responding to some conception they have within themselves of an irretrievable damage or self-betrayal they are enduring. The illustrators reach out through muted theatrical gestures and body movements which Trollope himself describes in order to indicate that something permanent and meaningful is achingly at stake. Trollope's illustrators often devote infinite care over the details of such a moment.

Some of the most frequently-reprinted of these illustrations depict women weeping on a bed or couch; we see them crouching or kneeling in supplication to a man. Left undiscussed because reprinted much less often are the depictions of men in more restrained but to them equally difficult moments of supplication or proud defiance, often before a group of other men. The best known of the former is Millais's depiction of Lucy Robarts's weeping on her bed after she has lied to Lord Lufton by telling him she does not love him (Framley Parsonage, 'Was it not a lie?' facing p. 168). Trollope's contemporaries mocked this illustration as a parody of a crinoline, and saw in it a satire on Framley Parsonage. They ignored the reason for the distress and melancholy: in such pictures Trollope and his illustrators show men and women who have not seized an opportunity for real fulfilment or have been pressured into a decision which will cut their lives off from such experiences. Holl's Madame Marie Goesler lies on a couch with her head pushed against a pillow in a posture closely similar to that of Millais's Lucy lying on a bed. Marie mourns the distance between herself and Phineas, a distance she feel unable to cross (Phineas Redux, 'What is the use of sticking to a man who doesn't want you', facing p. 374). Such scenes of private loss provide the text for the last picture in a number of Trollope's novels: Thomas's Lily Dale stands behind a curtain looking out a window as John Eames walks away (The Last Chronicle, 'The Last Denial', the frontispiece for Installment No. 32); Fawkes's Mrs Winifred Hurtle sits behind a curtain looking at a window as Paul Montague walks away (The Way We Live Now, 'Then, hiding herself at the window, she watched him as he went along the street', p. 397).

These illustrations of female misfits and outcasts correspond to illustrations of men in analogous states of loss, self-reproach and anguish . . .

The pictures of men insist on the heroism or difficulty involved in a male's coming to terms with the hard demands, limitations and natural longings and humiliations of life -- the obstacles put in his way by the passions and ambitions of other men or women who are more powerful than him. Trollope males are also depicted as unhappy as any Trollope female at their inability to marry someone they love (for example, Johnny Eames in The Small House, 'She has refused me and it is all over', facing p. 518). The sequence of illustrations for Orley Farm are famous for the pictures of Lady Mason, and the plot of Ralph the Heir for a saturnine depiction of a contemporary election campaign, but the illustrations for both novels show us the novels may also be read as the stories of two young sons, Lucius and Ralph, neither of them legitimate heirs, both studious and sensitive gentlemen powerless to prevent exile from property or home. Stone's most moving illustrations for He Knew He Was Right depict a man who reaches out for affection again and again and is rebuffed, tormented and finally shattered. One of the greatest and best known of all illustrations of Trollope's novels is by Lionel G. Fawkes for The Way We Live Now. It is of Auguste Melmotte at the bottom of a marble staircase, marble columns on either side of him, with his legs apart and stomach arched outwards, one hand in his pocket, the other outstretched and holding a cigar. Fawkes has shown us Trollope's Melmotte as a hard, vulgar yet nervous man, a Colossus in modern dress defying the universe and his enemies -- just before he is humiliated in Parliament and, badly in debt, commits suicide . . .

Although rarely reprinted, Fawkes's depiction of the moment when Melmotte's daughter, Marie, is confronted by a hired detective in the middle of a dark, crowded anonymous railway station is as powerful as Fawkes's picture of Melmotte (The Way We Live Now, 'You, I think, are Miss Melmotte', p. 207). Marie had fled her father because she hoped Sir Felix Carbury would be tempted by her money and whatever love he had for her to sail with her to America and marry her there. Felix has not had the courage, has spent the night gambling away the money he was given for the fare, gotten drunk and retreated to bed in his mother's house. In a dark square cavern made of iron-wrought ceilings, a flooring made of sharp squares of hardwood, lit by glaring hanging lights, a somewhat deferential but determined gentleman accosts a dark-haired, well-dressed young lady who takes a step backwards. The picture compels our attention at precisely its centre where are located the gentleman's eyes. He is half-embarrassed, apologetic, sorry for Marie while he pushes a note into her hand which tells her she must return. She twists away slightly and moves her hand away as she tries to escape that note. She cannot. He is a hired detective who has been paid. His posture and look of concern is repeated in Fawkes's depiction of a second private detective who stands at a slight distance behind the first. He stands in an analogous seemingly deferential pose. That there could be no real satisfaction or happiness for Marie Melmotte in a life with the weak, mercenary and shallow Felix makes the contrast of her helpless multiple frustrations and the power of her society and its instruments over her all the more ironic. Anonymous people at work or waiting for the train (a porter, other passengers) mill about, getting on with their lives. A policeman in uniform faces the second hired gentleman and looks into his eyes. At the right-front of the illustration another female passenger stands in dark shadows; her eyes are intensely gleaming, two tiny white areas that radiate hardness as she gazes at the encounter of Marie and her father's hired man. In collaboration with Trollope's remarkable novel, the eyes of this picture tell a complex story of hard defeat and little pity.

What unites all these pictures of supplication, ordeal and loss is their intensity, the worshipful care the illustrator has taken over what are inward and fleeting experiences.