Everything about Anthony Trollope totally explained
» For other people named Trollope, see Trollope (disambiguation).
Anthony Trollope (
April 24 1815 –
December 6 1882) became one of the most successful, prolific and respected
English novelists of the
Victorian era. Some of Trollope's best-loved works, known as the
Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of
Barsetshire; he also wrote penetrating novels on
political, social, and gender issues and conflicts of his day.
Trollope has always been a popular novelist. Noted fans have included Sir
Alec Guinness (who never travelled without a Trollope novel), former
British Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Sir
John Major, economist
John Kenneth Galbraith, American novelists
Sue Grafton and
Dominick Dunne and
soap opera writer
Harding Lemay. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he regained the esteem of critics by the mid-
twentieth century.
"Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even
Balzac is a romantic." —
W. H. Auden
Biography
Anthony Trollope's father, Thomas Anthony Trollope, worked as a
barrister. Thomas Trollope, though a clever and well-educated man and a Fellow of
New College, Oxford, failed at the bar due to his bad temper. In addition, his ventures into farming proved unprofitable and he lost an expected inheritance when an elderly uncle married and had children. Nonetheless, he came from a genteel background, with connections to the
landed gentry, and so wished to educate his sons as
gentlemen and for them to attend
Oxford or
Cambridge. The disparity between his family's social background and its poverty would be the cause of much misery to Anthony Trollope during his boyhood.
Born in London, Anthony attended
Harrow School as a
day-boy for three years from the age of seven, as his father's farm lay in that neighbourhood. After a spell at a private school, he followed his father and two older brothers to
Winchester College, where he remained for three years. He returned to Harrow as a day-boy to reduce the cost of his education. Trollope had some very miserable experiences at these two
public schools. They ranked as two of the most élite schools in England, but Trollope had no money and no friends, and was bullied a great deal. At the age of twelve, he fantasized about suicide. However, he also daydreamed, constructing elaborate imaginary worlds.
In 1827, his mother
Frances Trollope moved to
America with Trollope's three younger siblings, where she opened a bazaar in
Cincinnati, which proved unsuccessful. Thomas Trollope joined them for a short time before returning to the farm at Harrow, but Anthony stayed in England throughout. His mother returned in 1831 and rapidly made a name for herself as a writer, soon earning a good income. His father's affairs, however, went from bad to worse. He gave up his legal practice entirely and failed to make enough income from farming to pay rents to his landlord
Lord Northwick. In 1834 he fled to
Belgium to avoid arrest for debt. The whole family moved to a house near
Bruges, where they lived entirely on Frances's earnings. In 1835, Thomas Trollope died.
While living in Belgium, Anthony worked as a
Classics usher (a junior or assistant teacher) in a school with a view to learning
French and
German, so that he could take up a promised
commission in an
Austrian cavalry regiment, which had to be cut short at six weeks. He then obtained a position as a civil servant in the British
Post Office through one of his mother's family connections, and returned to London on his own. This provided a respectable, gentlemanly occupation, but not a well-paid one.
Time in Ireland
Trollope lived in
boarding houses and remained socially awkward; he referred to this as his "hobbledehoyhood". He made little progress in his career until the Post Office sent him to
Ireland in 1841. He married an Englishwoman named Rose Heseltine in 1844. They lived in Ireland until 1859 when they moved back to England.
Despite the calamity of the famine in Ireland, Trollope wrote of his time in Ireland in his autobiography:
» "It was altogether a very jolly life that I led in Ireland. The Irish people didn't murder me, nor did they even break my head. I soon found them to be good-humoured, clever - the working classes very much more intelligent than those of England - economical and hospitable."
His professional role as a post-office surveyor brought him into contact with Irish people. Trollope began writing on the numerous long train trips around Ireland he'd to take to carry out his postal duties. Setting very firm goals about how much he'd write each day, he eventually became one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote his earliest
novels while working as a Post Office inspector, occasionally dipping into the "
lost-letter" box for ideas.
Significantly, many of his earliest novels have Ireland as their setting — natural enough given his background, but unlikely to enjoy warm critical reception, given the contemporary English attitudes towards Ireland. It has been pointed out by critics that Trollope's view of Ireland separates him from many of the other Victorian novelists. Some critics claim that Ireland didn't influence Trollope as much as his experience in England, and that the society in Ireland harmed him as a writer, especially since Ireland was experiencing the potato famine during his time there. Such critics were dismissed as holding bigoted opinions against Ireland and didn't reflect Trollope's true attachment to the island.
There were three novels written about Ireland, and two were written during the famine while the third deals with the famine as a theme (
The Macdermots of Ballycloran,
The Landleaguers and
Castle Richmond respectively). Two short stories deal with Ireland ("The O'Conors of Castle Conor, County Mayo" and "Father Giles of Ballymoy" ). It has been argued by some critics that these works seek to unify an Irish and British identity, instead of view the two as distinct. Even as an Englishman in Ireland, he was still able to attain what was seen as essential to being an "Irish writer": possessed, obsessed, and "mauled" by Ireland.
The reception of the Irish works left much to be desired. Henry Colburn wrote to Trollope to say, "It is evident that readers don't like novels on Irish subjects as well as on others". In particular, magazines such as
New Monthly Magazine wrote reviews that attacked the Irish for their actions during the famine were representative of the dismissal by English readers to any work written about the Irish.
As such, Trollope wrote, about Phineas Finn as an Irishman:
» "There was nothing to be gained by the peculiarity, and there was an added difficulty in obtaining sympathy and affection for a politician belonging to a nationality whose politics are not respected in England. But in spite of this Phineas succeeded."
Return to England
By the mid-
1860s, Trollope had reached a fairly senior position within the Post Office hierarchy. Postal history credits him with introducing the
pillar box (the ubiquitous bright red
mail-box) in the
United Kingdom. He had by this time also started to earn a substantial income from his novels. He had overcome the awkwardness of his youth, made good friends in literary circles, and hunted enthusiastically.
He left the Post Office in 1867 to run for
Parliament as a
Liberal candidate in 1868. After he lost, he concentrated entirely on his literary
career. While continuing to produce novels rapidly, he also edited the
St Paul's Magazine, which published several of his novels in serial form.
His first major success came with
The Warden (1855) — the first of six novels set in the fictional
county of "Barsetshire" (often collectively referred to as the
Chronicles of Barsetshire), usually dealing with the clergy. The comic masterpiece
Barchester Towers (1857) has probably become the best-known of these. Trollope's other major series, the
Palliser novels, concerned itself with politics, with the wealthy, industrious
Plantagenet Palliser and his delightfully spontaneous, even richer wife
Lady Glencora usually featuring prominently (although, as with the Barsetshire series, many other well-developed characters populated each novel).
Trollope's popularity and critical success diminished in his later years, but he continued to write prolifically, and some of his later novels have acquired a good reputation. In particular, critics generally acknowledge the sweeping satire
The Way We Live Now (1875) as his masterpiece. In all, Trollope wrote forty-seven novels, as well as dozens of short stories and a few books on travel.
Anthony Trollope died in London in 1882. His grave stands in
Kensal Green Cemetery, near that of his contemporary
Wilkie Collins.
C. P. Snow wrote a biography of Trollope, published in 1975, called
Trollope: His Life and Art.
Reputation
After his death, Trollope's
Autobiography appeared. Trollope's downfall in the eyes of the critics stemmed largely from this volume. Even during his writing career, reviewers tended increasingly to shake their heads over his prodigious output (the same complaint was targeted at
Charles Dickens), but when Trollope revealed that he strictly adhered to a daily writing quota, he confirmed his critics' worst fears. The
Muse, in their view,
might prove immensely prolific, but she'd never ever follow a schedule. (Interestingly, no-one decried
Gustave Flaubert for diligence, though he too worked on a schedule-scheme similar to Trollope's.) Furthermore, Trollope admitted that he wrote for money; at the same time he called the disdain of money false and foolish. The Muse, claimed the critics, shouldn't be aware of money.
Julian Hawthorne, an American writer, critic and friend of Trollope, while praising him as a man, calling him "a credit to England and to human nature, and ...[deserving] to be numbered among the darlings of mankind," at the same time says that "he has done great harm to English fictitious literature by his novels" ("The Maker of Many Books,"
Confessions and Criticisms).
Henry James also expressed mixed opinions of Trollope. The young James wrote some scathing reviews of Trollope's novels (
The Belton Estate, for instance, he called "a stupid book, without a single thought or idea in it ... a sort of mental
pabulum"). He also made it clear that he disliked Trollope's narrative method; Trollope's cheerful interpolations into his novels about how his storylines could take any twist their author wanted didn't appeal to James' sense of artistic integrity. However, James thoroughly appreciated Trollope's attention to realistic detail, as he wrote in an essay shortly after the novelist's death:
"His [Trollope's] great, his incontestable merit, was a complete appreciation of the usual...he felt all daily and immediate things as well as saw them; felt them in a simple, direct, salubrious way, with their sadness, their gladness, their charm, their comicality, all their obvious and measurable meanings...Trollope will remain one of the most trustworthy, though not one of the most eloquent of writers who have helped the heart of man to know itself...A race is fortunate when it has a good deal of the sort of imagination — of imaginative feeling — that had fallen to the share of Anthony Trollope; and in this possession our English race isn't poor."
James disliked Trollope's
breaking the fourth wall in addressing readers directly. However, Trollope may have had some influence on James's own work; the earlier novelist's treatment of
family tensions, especially between fathers and daughters, may resonate in some of James' novels. For instance, Alice Vavasor and her selfish father in the first of the so-called
Palliser novels,
Can You Forgive Her?, may pre-figure Kate Croy and her own insufferable father, Lionel, in
The Wings of the Dove.
Writers such as
Thackeray,
Eliot and
Collins admired and befriended Trollope, and George Eliot noted that she couldn't have embarked on so ambitious a project as
Middlemarch without the precedent set by Trollope in his own novels of the fictional — yet thoroughly alive — county of Barsetshire.
As trends in the world of the novel moved increasingly towards subjectivity and artistic experimentation, Trollope's standing with critics suffered. In the
1940s, Trollopians made attempts to resurrect his reputation; he enjoyed a critical Renaissance in the
1960s, and again in the
1990s. Some critics today have a particular interest in Trollope's portrayal of women — he caused remark even in his own day for his remarkable insight and sensitivity to the inner conflicts caused by the position of women in
Victorian society. Less compelling however, is the anti-semitism which appears in some of his work (for instance, in
The Eustace Diamonds, where he refers to the character of Mr Emilius as a "nasty, greasy, lying, squinting Jew preacher"), and which exceeds anything to be found, say, in either Dickens or James.
A Trollope Society flourishes in the
United Kingdom, as does its sister society in the United States.
Trollope's works on television
The
British Broadcasting Corporation has made several
television-drama serials based on the works of Anthony Trollope:
The Barchester Chronicles, a seven-episode adaptation of the first two Barset novels, The Warden and Barchester Towers. Adapted by Alan Plater, it starred Donald Pleasence as the Reverend Septimus Harding, Geraldine McEwan as Mrs Proudie, Nigel Hawthorne as Archdeacon Grantly, and Alan Rickman as the Reverend Obadiah Slope.
The Way We Live Now, a four-episode adaptation of the novel of the same name. Adapted by Andrew Davies, it starred David Suchet as Auguste Melmotte and Matthew Macfadyen as Sir Felix Carbury.
He Knew He Was Right transmitted April 18–May 9 2004 on BBC One, in four sixty-minute episodes. Produced by BBC Wales, and adapted again by Andrew Davies, it starred, amongst others, Oliver Dimsdale, Bill Nighy, Laura Fraser, David Tennant, and Geoffrey Palmer.
In the United States, PBS has broadcast all four series: The Pallisers in its own right, and The Barchester Chronicles, The Way We Live Now, and He Knew He Was Right as part of Masterpiece Theatre.
Trollope's works on radio
The BBC commissioned a four-part radio adaptation of The Small House at Allington, the fifth novel of the Chronicles of Barsetshire, which it broadcast in 1993. Listeners responded so positively that the BBC had the five remaining novels of the series adapted, and BBC Radio 4 broadcast the complete series between December 1995 and March 1998. In this adaptation, Stephen Moore played the part of Archdeacon Grantley.
BBC Radio 4 broadcast a serialised radio adaptation of The Kellys and the O'Kellys, starring Derek Jacobi, between 21 November 1982 and 2 January 1983.
Radio 4 broadcast The Pallisers, a new twelve-part adaptation of the Palliser novels, from January to April 2004 in the weekend Classic Serial slot.
Works
Novels unless otherwise noted:
Other
Further Information
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