The novel contrasts two love affairs, each involving an aristocrat and a commoner. The subversive Lord Hampstead's plunge into middle class society in his passionate 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 bizarre 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 the dull working lives, plain homes, blank streets, and limited horizons of the dwellers in Paradise Row,using them as an ironic choric commentary on the unattainable world of rank, wealth and freedom, symbolized by life in the great country houses.
