Planty Pall’s Triumph : THE PALLISER NOVELS: Can You Forgive Her? Phineas Finn. The Eustace Diamonds. Phineas Redux. The Prime Minister. The Duke’s Children, <i> By Anthony Trollope (Oxford University Press: six volumes: $16.50 each, $100 the set)</i>

When Great Britain announced that it was going on the decimal coinage system 20 years ago, the news found its way into the White House press room via a press release. It was not a bulletin likely to engender excitement in the American press, and perhaps only appeared as White House news because the President had made some routine comment upon it.

But a usually taciturn senior reporter who picked up the release waved it above his head and gave the shout: “Hooray for Planty Pall!”

Two or three other reporters ran to the news bin, knowing just what had happened. It was immediately clear who, in that otherwise puzzled group, were Trollope fans.

Trollope fans know that it was the dearest wish of the Victorian liberal aristocrat Plantagenet Palliser--whose political career and personal life are the threads connecting the Palliser novels--to institute decimal coinage in England. Although he became prime minister and the most powerful duke in the land, he never was able to succeed in this; the books ended in 1876, when his quest could serve as an illustration of how quixotic he was.

True Trollope fans even sympathize with Planty Pall (as no one called him to his face) on this issue. Those who know him only through the visually magnificent but emotionally simplified Masterpiece Theater television Palliser series saw a dry and dutiful patriarch, presumably worthy, but as trying as his romantic wife and children found him to be.

But to Trollopians, Plantagenet Palliser is the most noble character--in both senses--Trollope ever created. The author thought so, too. That Palliser’s natural aptitude was for economics, and that he brought almost none to the study of human emotion, only made him endearing. Pursuing a passion for decimal coinage while his wife was torn with a passion of a different sort for a ne’er-do-well made Palliser, when he chose to sacrifice his pleasure, more heroic than foolish.

But he is only one of dozens of highly complex characters in these books, not even the most prominent one. Two books are devoted to the socially facile Irish politician Phineas Finn, one to the original Material Girl, Lizzie Eustace, and the first volume to Alice Vavasor, who--along with such other vivid characters as Marie Goesler, Laura Standish and, ultimately, Palliser’s wife, the irrepressible Lady Glencora--craved such vicarious political careers as were open to women.

It would be an impertinence to recommend these books. Of course everyone who is interested in human nature in its private and public manifestations should read them, and the six volumes of Trollope’s Barsetshire series first. (Planty Pall makes a brief first appearance in one of the Barsetshire novels as a stiff young man with a hilariously mute crush on a married lady whose languor makes even him seem hot-blooded.)

The pertinent questions about a new edition are how portable and durable they are. You are going to live with them a long time. Paperback editions will not do: Each of these novels is so satisfyingly thick that paperback versions soon crack their spines. Hardcovers too large to slip into a briefcase probably will cause absenteeism at work, in addition to the family neglect that is to be expected.

The new Oxford set is a satisfactory one. Each volume is 4 3/4 by 6 inches, bound in black and beige. Explanatory notes are intelligently limited to archaic and/or British words or customs, bits of history, and references to Trollope’s other works or life. The same bibliography and Trollope chronology appears in each, and each has its own Who’s Who, with later volumes referring back to the earlier history of the characters. Trollope could have used that himself, as he forgot an entire child, a junior Lady Glencora, between Volumes 5 and 6.

Each has been edited and introduced by someone different, from such points of view as feminism, the class system, the reform movement, the world market, and England’s relationships to Ireland and to America. Only occasionally do the introducers complain that Trollope didn’t write someone else’s (Turgenev’s or Flaubert’s or Dickens’ or George Eliot’s or Wilkie Collins’ or Thomas Mann’s or John Dos Passos’) books. There are five different illustrators, but they all use bland styles that could collectively be called Greeting- Card Nostalgia.

“Phineas Finn” has an appendix on the Second Reform Bill; “Phineas Redux” is supplemented with Trollope’s own unsuccessful election address and Gladstone’s position statement on the Irish Church bill, and “The Prime Minister,” as the last volume, includes excerpts on the series from Trollope’s autobiography.

It becomes a question of how much reference material you are willing to lug around. Personally, this reviewer prefers the previous Oxford World’s Classics edition--text only, 3 1/2 by 6 inches, in beautiful blue bindings with matching ribbon bookmarks sewn in. Some years ago, when reading them and 47 other Trollope novels successively in this series, she inadvertently discovered that she had developed a reputation for piety. Word had gotten around that it was the same book that she always carried, and that it was the Book of Common Prayer.