“The Odd Trump,” from 1875, holds some peculiar pleasures for our times. Both have a character whose finances are a point of contention. ILLUSTRATION BY ISABEL SELIGER

I think I really began to like this Trump fellow when he tore his coat off, dived into a raging river, and saved a drowning woman after she’d been flung from a train wreck. “Save me!” she’d have cried, if only she’d been conscious. “Save me, Trump!” Oh, that Trump. Wrestling vicious mastiffs to the ground; smoothly confronting a con man on the Paris-to-Calais train with a pistol in his hand; hunting ghosts at midnight in a haunted English mansion. Rather less money on him than he’d have you believe, true, but a man of cool, levelheaded action all the same. What a character!

He is a character—I mean, in a Victorian novel.

The anonymously authored and utterly forgotten tale “The Odd Trump,” from 1875, is a ripe bit of Victorian preposterousness. Starting with the damsel saved from a train wreck, the book includes everything from a disputed will and a mysterious old servant to a cursed mansion. Also: ghostly sleepwalkers! Bloody duels! Secret sliding doors! (The latter, hidden in a conservatory, might be more accurately described as a secret sliding lemon tree.) But, most important: it has a hero named Trump.

And his old friend and sometimes rival? Clinton, of course.

“You have a regular armory, Clinton,” said Trump, as he glanced at the warlike array. “Yes, I have gathered them up at odd times and places. Let us try a pass with the foils. . . . We will not bother with the masks. I am anxious to see if I am as clumsy as I used to be. En garde!”

Along with Trump and Clinton on lying (Trump: “ ‘Is it so very odd, to abstain from lying?’ ‘Very!’ answered Clinton, dryly.”), “The Odd Trump” contains what may be the most Victorian paragraphs ever set to paper:

Clinton? Never heard that name. But a Yankee could have a dozen names. There was that Göttingen Yankee. Ah! Stratton. Of course! The very same. Oh ho! Mr. Trump, you knew Stratton, and you have not told me. You are very thick; close friends, I hear. I begin to think you will bear watching, Mr. Trump. And talking of watching, there is Mr. Trump on the terrace. Not alone—I see the lavender silk. Can it be the French girl? Mabel!

It’s a shame that our own era’s Clinton never persuaded Trump to spend a night in a haunted mansion, as this one does. For the American De Witt Clinton and the British Trumpley (Trump) Wailes are, it happens, college chums from the Continent, now living in Gloucestershire amid an excess of fretting about reputations, marriageability, and annual incomes. “The Odd Trump” is a curio of the fussy kind of fiction that once filled bookstores but scarcely attracts any interest today; just a year after its publication, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” pointed American literature in a very different direction.

Even in its own time, one favorable review of “The Odd Trump” found that “the plot is rather complicated”—a sure signal to reach for the brandy. The Nation’s review was generous enough to concede that “we are always grateful to any rising literary man who does not fill us with physical loathing.” But just who was this rising literary man? The novel’s setting, in Gloucester, and the deft handling of dialogue by American characters, led another reviewer to speculate that the author of “the strange book with the stranger title” was an Englishman, or perhaps a well-travelled American.

He was, in fact, George J. A. Coulson—a native Baltimorean whose initial career, in the eighteen-forties, had been devoted more to running a downtown drugstore than to pursuing the sort of ill-starred fame found by his fellow-local Edgar Allan Poe. He was decidedly not fighting duels in English country lanes, or creeping through mansions at midnight with a lantern and a pistol: by 1875, Coulson was living in New Jersey and maintaining a Manhattan office as an accountant specializing in handling foreign exchange and import duties. “The Odd Trump” was a late bloom in a career spent among ledgers and tariff statutes; naturally, Coulson gives his protagonist a job in a banking firm, where Trump manifests such heroic talents at the foreign desk—including dodging a shady investment prospectus for a Nevada silver mine—that the hand of the boss’s daughter and control of the company inevitably follow.

Clinton and Trump together, on the other hand, are an altogether less buttoned-down combination of personalities.