sentences:  By 1864 less than 1,000 parish cures were being served by assistant curates; while numbers of perpetual curates had increased to over 4,000.From being viewed, at the beginning of the century, as the most favoured class of curates; perpetual curates had by the 1850s become the least favoured class of incumbents.Perpetual curacies had long been liable to remain poorly paid and inadequately housed relative to other full incumbencies of the Church of England, even when augmented from Queen Anne's Bounty; consequently the Perpetual Curate commonly features in mid-Victorian literary culture as a figure endeavouring to maintain the social standing of beneficed clergyman, but whose family aspirations (especially marital) were being frustrated by constricted financial expectations; most notably in "The Perpetual Curate" by Mrs Oliphant, and in "The Last Chronicle of Barset" by Anthony Trollope.