A brief note on The Claverings: what we know

Like so many of Anthony Trollope's novels, The Claverings has marriage proposals at its heart.  At the very beginning, the beautiful Julia rejects Harry in favor of Lord Ongar (and his cash); Harry, initially sure that He Will Never Love Again, promptly falls in love again with Florence, the daughter of his employer.  Alas, the rather quickly-widowed Julia returns, soiled (unfairly) in name but considerably wealthier from her marriage transaction.  Unaware that Harry now Loves Another, Julia seeks to renew their relationship.  Will Harry desert Florence for Julia (and her cash)?

I've noted before that Trollope's novels frequently emphasize deliberation over action: many of his plots are devoted to characters thinking about a particular action and its ramifications.  What's striking about The Claverings is the extent to which characters almost unthinkingly toss around the words "know" or "known," either in dialogue or free indirect discourse.  By contrast, while the narrator also "knows" things, he far more frequently hedges his account with qualifiers.  Thus, pulling a random page from the first chapter:

"Enough! Indeed it is not. From what you know of me, do you think it likely that that will be enough?"   

"That's nonsense, Mr. Clavering. My falsehood, if you should choose to call me false, is of a very different nature, and is pardonable by all laws known to the world."

"Well, well, you know I don't mean to make you angry."

"You will not be more fit for matrimony because you are going to give up your profession. Now, Lord Ongar has--heaven knows what--perhaps sixty thousand a year." (4)

Thus the characters.  Within the next few pages, though, the narrator tells us that "[o]f them I do not know that it is necessary to say much more at present" (8), "of Harry Clavering it perhaps may not be necessary to say much in the way of description" (8), "[i]t must be presumed that Julia Brabazon had made herself agreeable in the house, and also probably useful" (9), "[t]his Lady Clavering did; and had she refused to do it, I think that poor Harry Clavering's check would have been used" (13), and so forth (all emphases mine). 

The characters' apparently unconscious resort to "I know" and variations thereon might seem like a tic, were it not that they do it so frequently.  In fact, the characters often know much less than they think they do: Julia doesn't know that Harry is engaged; Julia's brother-in-law doesn't know the truth about how she was treated by her husband; Harry doesn't know his own mind; Harry's sister Fanny doesn't understand her own feelings for her father's curate, Samuel Saul; and so forth.  If anything, the "I know"s--whether they lay claim to hard knowledge or act as placeholders in a conversation--provide islands of false certainty in a narrative positively swirling with uncertainty.  The characters often err because they feel safe in their assumed knowledge, especially their assumed self-knowledge; the narrator, by contrast, does his best to refrain from making absolute assertions about even his own characters.