Dcikens v Trollope in use of coincidence and surprise

The great "secret" in Trollope's Dr Thorne is that Thorne's niece Mary may inherit a huge amount of money - Thorne knows this but keeps it to himself - neither Mary nor her potential husband Frank Gresham know of this possible inheritance - so all the while that the Gresham family is going nuts over the idea that Frank has to "marry money" to protect the family estate (and nobility), the young woman he's in love w/ and whom they spurn is the very one who could bring him the money the family needs. Not sure where the novel will conclude - with a happily ever after in which Frank and Mary get married and also have the money the need - or in which they don't get married and she ironically inherits the money and watches his family go to ruins getting exactly what they deserve - or in some kind of heartbreak and tragedy for Mary (which is what Trollope hints). In any event, it's striking to see how Trollope handles this material - quite differently from the way his contemporary Dickens would have done (and did do). When there's a secret in a Dickens novel it tends to be a secret kept from all of us: Pip's inheritance, for example, if my memory of Great X is accurate. Dickens uses (overuses?) coincidence and surprise for dramatic (melodramatic?) impact. Trollope does not. He reveals to us and to the central character the fact of Mary's likely inheritance, so we know more than most of the characters and we watch the plot unfold (relatively) naturally: the surprise and melodrama will be that of the characters, w/in the novel rather than outside of the novel and encompassing us, the readers. We have a cool and detached stance - though not exactly omniscient, as we share the knowledge with the central character. And it's not exactly a realistic novel either, not compared say with his French (or even Russian) contemporaries; the coincidences involving the ties between the benefactor and the Thorne family - too complicated to summarize but roughly speaking Mary's benefactor killed her father/Dr Thorne's brother, and later became a confidant of Dr Thorne and one of the wealthiest men in England - strain credulity but serve as a fuse to ignite largely temperate plot.