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The autobiographical side lies in the person of Charley Tudor - a likeable young man who, when the novel commences, is still very much in what Trollope terms elsewhere the "hobbledehoy" phase of life. Charley has got into a bad public office where he has many temptations to behave in an undesirable way - and he falls into those temptations with a will. We see him through a fliration with a barmaid, via which he is nearly entrapped into marriage (shades of John Eames and Amelia Roper), and (unlike the worthy John) falling into considerable debt and familiarity with a thoroughly unattractive moneylender. This aspect too, rings very true (wonderful description of the way in which this vulture toys with his prey in small ways, which could only come from life!), and one sees what might have become of AT, but for his talent for fiction. This, too is Charley Tudor's salvation, and he ends the book like AT, prosperously married, a successful novelist and doing well in a more respectable public office.
Autobiographical also (with a twist) is Katie Woodward - a facsimilie of Trollope's beloved sister; but here AT indulges in wish-fulfillment and allows Katie to live and thrive where his sister died. However the passages by her sickbed, when she is convinced that she is dying, resonate with the love and grief which Trollope felt as he watched beside his sister's bed.
Also very worth study is the story of Alaric Tudor, a very modern hero in some ways: a man of more style than substance, eschewing the finer points of morality for career success, and leveraging up to a point where one false step can only bring him down.
The weak points - Alaric is really not very likeable, and nor is his wife Gertrude (for all her family praise her at the end, she seems to me to take "My husband right or wrong" too far) and the third couple, Harry and Linda, are little more than makeweight characters. There is way, way too much of two of AT's pet subjects - the proper running of the civil service, and parliamentary affairs (here a profoundly tedious parliamentary enquiry). The in-jokes about authorship are also a little de trop.
But the strength of its good bits far outweight the inconveniences of the bad - there are passages and themes in the book that return to one again and again.
The novel concerns the intertwining stories of the three clerks and a widowed mother and her daughters. One of the narrative threads is rather creepy to modern eyes, and none of them really grip the reader, but the writing carries one along.
One problem could be that Trollope tries to handle too many characters. The Three Clerks of the title are Harry Norman, his best friend and eventually worst enemy Alaric Tudor (who steals his promotion and then his lady-love), and Alaric's cousin, the dissipated and indebted Charley Tudor. Of these young men, Harry Norman in his innocence, having much to learn about the ways of men, women and the world, would have been the most interesting to pursue, but Trollope concentrates on Alaric and his ambitions which eventually get him into a courtroom and jail -- though with a surprisingly light sentence for a man who swindles a client's fortune. The young men are matched to three young women, the Woodward sisters. Gertrude, the eldest, is cold-hearted and ambitious, and though Harry Norman loves her greatly, makes a heartless but intellectual decision to unite herself with Alaric, whose ambition she admires. She pays the price for this, but she does so in the typical female role, always viewing her husband as something near to a god, never blaming him for his failings and his crimes, and standing by her man through the trials that will follow for her and her children. Gertrude, like Alaric, gets her comeuppance, but she is also symbolic of the dependent woman of her time and often of our times, sticking to a man through all insult because the world has convinced her that not only can she not stand on her own, but she deserves no better than to be the support of a man whose ethics and behaviors are questionable. Linda, Gertrude's younger sister, who is loved and romanced but then dumped by Alaric, who cold-heartedly and ambitiously wants the oldest daughter rather than the one he professes to love, is like Harry Norman an interesting character who should have been explored but who gets little mention in the pages of the book. She is superceded by her baby sister, Katie, who falls for the useless rogue Charley and thus falls into an hysterical wasting-away that is so annoying that you almost wish . . . Well, never mind what you wish, but all six of these characters are dissatisfying and foolish, victims of their era and their stations in life. Add to that, we have Mrs. Woodward, mother to the three women, who is very nice but ineffectual and though having the opportunity to succeed, succumbs to being helpless without a man to take care of her. She is of no benefit to her daughters and actually far too negligent in her mothering of them, leading to the disasters and potential disasters in the book. Lesser characters include Undecimus Scott, the villian who leads Alaric astray, who is not as evil as he is expected to be but merely manipulative and conniving, essentially a bore. There is also Uncle Bat, a retired sea captain who makes a home with the Woodwards and generally drinks himself into a stupor. Or members of the civil service who both support or compete with Harry and Alaric in their rise in their careers. Everything ends well for Harry, at least, and Linda -- two good people get their just reward. Charley Tudor turns into a Trollope himself, writing stories for the literary magazines of his day, although the author reproduces his stories within the context of the book, which introduces just another method of dulling the pace and the action of the novel itself. Plenty of pages here to skim or skip, the book could have been half the size but still have retained the essence of the story -- on the other hand, if the author had only developed his characters and followed the important ones more closely, we could have had a finer novel of psychological and moral import.
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