Anthony Trollope

Arthur Pollard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317211976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Anthony Trollope is perhaps best known for the group of Barsetshire novels, a rich and enduring picture of society in a small cathedral town. He also wrote a number of Irish novels and a series about political society known as the 'Palliser novels'.

First published in 1978, this introduction to Trollope's life and work surveys all of his forty-seven novels, as well as his various miscellaneous works, and calls for a reassessment of his impressive achievement.

This book will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature.

1 Life and Character

DOI: 10.4324/9781315618784-1

Writing to Watkins about his photograph in April 1860, Trollope commented: 'I think the portrait as it now stands will do very well. It looks uncommon fierce, as that of a dog about to bite; but that I fear is the nature of the animal portrayed.' (Letters, No. 87) Twenty years later - and as the 1873 'Spy' cartoon in Vanity Fair amply demonstrates - Julian Hawthorne described him as

a broad-shouldered sturdy man, of middle height, with a ruddy countenance and snow-white tempestuous beard and hair. He wore large, gold-rimmed spectacles, but his eyes were black and brilliant. . . . He spoke volubly and almost boisterously, and his voice was full-toned and powerful ... his words bursting forth from beneath his white moustache with such an impetus of hearty breath that it seemed as if all opposing arguments must be blown away .... Here was a man of abundant physical strength and vigor, no doubt, but carrying within him a nature more than commonly alert and impressible .... His character was simple and straightforward to a fault, but he was abnormally conscientious .... It might be thought that he was overburdened with self-esteem, and unduly opinionated; but, in fact, he was but over-anxious to secure the good-will and agreement of all with whom he came in contact .... He was never more angry than he was forgiving and generous. (Confessions aud Criticisms, 1887, quoted Sadleir, 1961 p. 338)

I have selected rigorously from a long and perceptive estimation, but the essential Trollope, I think, is there - full-blooded, prejudiced, energetic, forthright, sensitive, sympathetic.

Trollope was born and died in London. After their marriage his parents set up house at 6 Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, and there in quick succession five of their children were born. Anthony, their fourth son, was born in 1815 on 24 April, some eight weeks before the battle of Waterloo. Two younger sisters completed the family, but, as with so many nineteenth-century families, two of the children died in childhood, and only Anthony and his eldest brother, Tom, survived into comparative old age.

Their parents were each the offspring of country parsons, the father coming from Hertfordshire and the mother from Heckfield in Hampshire, an area which Trollope celebrates in Ralph the Heir (ch. 11) as a 'county in which moorland and woodland and pasture are more daintily thrown together to please the eye' than anywhere else in England. Thomas Anthony Trollope, the father, was a scholar of Winchester and then Vinerian (Law) Fellow of New College, Oxford, before becoming a Chancery barrister. Through his mother's family he was the accepted heir to his uncle, Adolphus Meetkerke, the wealthy squire of Julians near Royston in Hertfordshire. Prospects could hardly have been brighter: ahead lay a career at the Bar, already rich in promise, and the succession to a country estate. One defect was sufficient to lose both - Thomas Trollope's uncontrollable irascibility. Attorneys ceased to come with their briefs, preferring other barristers who would not lambast them for their stupidity; and the lawyer's popularity with his uncle fell sharply as a result of their violent political differences. The crushing blow came when the uncle, following his childless first wife's death, quickly remarried and produced in his sixties a numerous family who thus destroyed the Trollopes' hopes of joining the landed classes.

There is a sour irony, therefore, in their move from London to Harrow in 1817 when, still possessing his great expectations, the elder Trollope leased 400 acres from Lord Northwick and built on it an expensive house which, in anticipation perhaps, he called Julians. It was the nearest he ever came to becoming a country squire and the nearest also that he ever came to Julians. Though he continued in chambers, work fell off, and his attempts at farming were as ill-fated as his practice of the law. One son (Arthur) died, and, both marvellous to relate and difficult to believe of a lawyer, the title deeds to some property in London were mislaid and Mrs Trollope's marriage-settlement was discovered to be invalid.

His irascibility vented itself also on his own family and worsened with the years. The boys were expected to follow their father to Winchester and New College and he spared no effort and no rage in urging them on. Harrow School, however - and this was one of the advantages of the move - offered practically free education to local boys. Thither therefore the Trollopes went, surely one of the very few occasions when Harrow has been a prep school for Winchester! Of his years at Harrow Anthony has left his own account. It is of a piece with his remark that his 'boyhood was, I think, as unhappy as that of a young gentleman could well be'. He was a day-boy, not even a day-boarder as his brothers had been, and he records that his journeyings between home and school were a daily purgatory. He was also the dunce of his class and he was dirty, 'not only slovenly in dress, but his work was equally dirty', as a school-friend, later Sir William Gregory of Coole, recalled. Trollope tells of constant floggings from the headmaster, and what he suffered at Harrow he was to continue suffering at his brother's hands at Winchester, where Tom was a prefect and Anthony a junior boy. Of this latter experience he comments: "That such thrashings should have been possible at a school as a continual part of one's daily life seems to me to argue a very ill condition of school discipline.' There is obviously deep feeling in this detached remark. Another is more personal when he tells of being unjustly blamed for some misdemeanour at the school in Sunbury-on-Thames, which he attended for two years before going on to Winchester: 'All that was fifty years ago and it burns me now as though it were yesterday.' The seared childhood of a Dickens or a Charlotte Brontë went into their novels. Of Trollope's, if we had not had the Autobiography, there would have been not a word.

It was not just physical punishment; there was also poverty with all the deprivations and sense of exclusion which that entailed, Trollope tells of unpaid fees and how his credit from the college buttery at Winchester was stopped and of something more - 'The loss of a shilling a week would not have been much, - even though pocket-money from other sources never reached me, - but that the other boys all knew it!' The family fortunes went from bad to worse. Julians had to be forsaken for what he calls 'a wretched tumble-down farmhouse', Anthony was withdrawn from Winchester to Harrow again, 'What right had a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from a dunghill, to sit next to the sons of peers? ... The indignities I endured are not to be described,' His poverty made him the taunt of his fellows; his tutor took him without fee, but let everybody know it; Trollope says of himself: 'I skulked and was odious in the eyes of those I admired and envied'; he longed to play cricket and racquets, but there was no money to equip him for these sports. (Quotations in this and the preceding paragraph from the Autobiography, ch. 1)

At home he lived alone with his father, for his mother and Henry, his brother, had gone off to America in furtherance of a hare-brained scheme of Anthony's father's to send 'pin-cushions, pepper-boxes and pocket-knives' to them at a store they opened in Cincinnati. This was in 1827, and later he and Tom went out, leaving Anthony, still at Winchester, to spend a gloomily memorable midsummer holiday alone in his father's chambers in Lincoln's Inn, 'wandering about in those old deserted buildings' and reading Shakespeare because there was nothing else to read. His father returned, Tom went to Oxford and Anthony was transferred to Harrow, alone once more with his father, who spent his time for the most part incarcerated in the parlour, working endlessly and pointlessly on his never-completed 'Encyclopaedia Ecclesiastica'.

At last fortune smiled, for though his father's writings were futile, Fanny Trollope's were not. Returning to England, she turned the American experience to some profit by publishing her Domestic Manners of the Americans, which was an immediate success. The poverty of the Harrow Weald farmhouse, not one of the children with a pillow to his head, was changed for another Julians or, rather, Julians Hill, the Orley Farm of Trollope's novel of that name; and Mrs Trollope embarked, at the age of fifty, on a prolific and successful career as author.

Hardly had Trollope left school, 'a hobbledehoy of nineteen, without any idea of a career' (Autobiography, ch. 2), than further blows hit the family. Old debts caught up with Trollope's father and the bailiffs distrained on Julians Hill. Trollope himself was bidden to drive his father to London, and thence to the Ostend boat, in fact, though Anthony did not know ·it, for him to escape imprisonment as a debtor. The elder Trollope was ill and so too were Henry and Emily who, with all the family except Tom, joined their father at Bruges. There he and Henry died, and Emily quickly followed them after the family returned home, this time to Hadley (Herts), to a house which Trollope described in detail in The Bertrams. Anthony himself was to suffer, in 1840, a serious illness, whose outward manifestation was asthma, but, his mother wrote, the doctors say 'this can only be a symptom and not the disease'. It was probably an illness of psychosomatic origin.

By this time Trollope had been at work for six years in the Post Office, which he was to serve both in England and abroad until 1867. His mother's influence had secured him a nomination in the fashion of those days, and despite his imperfections in spelling and handwriting he was appointed clerk at £90 a year. He did not commend himself to Colonel Maberly, the secretary, and in general those first six years were far from happy. Drinking, smoking and cards were the distraction of himself and his friends. There was probably some occasional flirtation and there were certainly some debts. The Three Clerks is a fictional reminiscence of these years, and The Small House at Allington also owes much to this period.

'In dire trouble, having debts on my head and quarrels with our Secretary-Colonel and a full conviction that my life was taking me downwards to the lowest pits' (Autobiography, ch. 3) - this is the prelude to the turning point in Trollope's life. He volunteered to go as surveyor's clerk to Ireland. His reputation preceded him in a note from the Colonel, but the ten years there from 1841 to 1851 were a record of achievement and happiness. At Banagher and Clonmel he brought efficiency to his work in reorganising the postal rounds, he took up hunting which was to be a passion with him for over thirty years and, in general, he developed a love for and became a social success with the people among whom he worked. Even his marriage to an Englishwoman, Rose Heseltine, daughter of a bank-manager in Rotherham, was permitted to cast only a passing cloud over his social relations.

It was now that he began to write, not, be it said, with much success, so that by 1850 he could say with a certain sardonic air to his mother that at the forthcoming Crystal Palace Exhibition 'I mean to exhibit four 4 vol. novels - all failures! - which I look upon as a great proof of industry at any rate.' (Letters, No. 19)

From 1851 to 1853 he was engaged on the reorganisation of postal arrangements in South Wales and South-West England iucluding the Channel Islands, and it was from Guernsey that he wrote in November 1851 suggesting the iron pillar-boxes that soon became and ever since have been a familiar feature of the British street-scene. He sought promotion in the Post Office, trying to gain the Superintendency of Mail Coaches in 1852 and ultimately being appointed Surveyor in 1854. He also continued to write and, though success came slowly, it came surely. The sojourn in the West Country inspired The Warden, but when it appeared Trollope was back in Ireland for another tour. Newby had published his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, in 1847. This yielded nothing, whilst his second, The Kellys and the O'Kellys, lost £63.10s.1½d. For his third novel, La Vendée, Trollope received the agreed advance of £20 and no more, presumably because not enough copies were sold. Even for the works that made his name he received at first only just over £20 for The Warden (1855) and an advance of £100 for Barchester Towers (1857). Longman published both these volumes, but Trollope was not satisfied with his terms.

For his next work, The Three Clerks (1858), Bentley paid £250 outright and in the same year Chapman & Hall outbid Bentley's offer by giving £400 for Doctor Thorne. They took a number of his other books, but in 1860 Trollope moved again, this time to Smith, Elder who serialised Framley Parsonage in the newly established Corn hill Magazine. For this he was paid £1000. Books followed one another with stunning rapidity, so much so that he published some novels (Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel) anonymously. He continued in his own characteristic vein in the Barsetshire series and in the Palliser or political novels. He exploited current fashions in such realms as the sensational and the mystery tale. What Mrs Braddon could do in Lady Audley's Secret Trollope would improve upon in Orley Farm. What made Wilkie Collins popular Trollope would try his hand at in The Eustace Diamonds. In addition, there were travel books, biographies and miscellanea. The story of Trollope's immense and methodical industry is too well known to need telling again. His own honesty in telling it and his meticulous account of the financial success of his writings did much to damn him in the eyes of his immediate successors. He claimed 'persevering diligence in [his] profession' and none would deny him that, but he went further, asserting 'that the work that has been done quickest has been done the best'.

After his final establishment in England in 1859 at Waltham House in Essex he still found time to go hunting three times a week, to carry on his duties in the Post Office, to undertake frequent trips abroad and to cultivate a host of literary and other acquaintances in London. In 1853 he had visited his brother Tom in Florence and again in 1857; the next year he went on Post Office business first to Egypt and then to the West Indies and in 1861-2 to the United States after a final visit to Italy in 1860. There he met Kate Field, an intelligent young woman, later to be a champion of women's rights. It was the beginning of a friendship of many years. Their correspondence (see Sadleir, 1961, pp. 218-25) includes some candid and sensible advice about writing from Trollope, and also touches on the Civil War (Trollope's visit coincided with the early months of that conflict). The attractive and intelligent girl of the Italian visit, though remaining very dear to Trollope, was seen to be turning into a militant Boston female, and there is something of this later persona in Wallachia Petrie of He Knew He Was Right.

Trollope's return to England in 1859 and his association with the Cornhill opened the way to literary London. He established a friendship with Thackeray, who edited the new periodical. He knew George Henry Lewes and George Eliot, whose work he admired and who acknowledged that her own Middlemarch owed much to Trollope. At their house he met Browning and Tennyson, Herbert Spencer, Tyndall and others prominent in the intellectual life of the time. He was a member of the Garrick Club and was elected to the Athenaeum. He stayed with the artist Millais, who was one of his illustrators, at the latter's house in the Highlands; he visited Sir Henry James (later Lord James of Hereford) in Kent and also at his shooting box in Wiltshire; he was entertained at the country houses of Lord Lytton at Knebworth and Lord Houghton at Monk Fryston; and in his last years - a result of his book on South Africa - he formed a close friendship with Lord Carnarvon and stayed at Highclere. Trollope's London life became even fuller after 1873 when he moved to 39 Montagu Square.

This, however, is to anticipate. In 1867 he resigned from the Post Office, feeling amongst other things that his talents and services had not received their due acknowledgment. His later years in the service had been marked by a running animosity between him and the secretary, Rowland Hill. He was none the less asked to make one further trip to the United States, where he arranged the Anglo-American Postal Treaty. While he was away, he missed nomination as a Liberal to the safe parliamentary seat of South-East Essex. Instead, he had to contest Beverley at great cost both in money and nervous frustration. He came bottom of the poll, but such had been the bribery and corruption that the election was declared invalid and the constituency disfranchised. Trollope's experiences in the election form the readable parts of what he himself recognised as a poor novel, Ralph the Heir. In the Auto-biography he describes himself somewhat elusively as an 'advanced conservative liberal', but the tone of all his work shows how the remarks of his first biographer, Escott, about him make sense: 'Whatever at different periods Trollope might think and call himself, his natural prejudices were always those of aristocratic and reactionary Toryism.' (Escott, 1913, p. 166) In the last year of his life he parted decisively from the Gladstonian Liberals over Home Rule for Ireland.

Excluded from active politics, Trollope returned to his work as editor of St Paul's Magazine and there published Phineas Finn - the first, as he put it, of a series of semi-political tales. The 1870s were even more prolific and more lucrative than the 1860s, but the last years marked some falling-off in popularity, such that, for instance, his publisher Chapman lost £120 on The Duke's Children in 1880, a sum which the novelist resolved to repay. (Letters, No. 796) He was little less active in his travels. In 1875 he went to Australia, where the younger of his two sons was engaged in sheep-farming. The journey was tiresome and the conditions hard, but Trollope went into it with his characteristic zest. The result was a book about the country, and two novels which have Australia for some part of their setting. In 1878 he went on his South African trip, found Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm and was impressed by Jameson 'who has just started in medical practice in Kimberley, and in whom I see qualities that will go to the making of events in this country'. (Quoted in Escott, 1913, p. 284) He visited Ireland in May 1882, shortly after the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish in Phoenix Park, Dublin; he was in Ireland for the last time, in August. He was writing about what he called the 'lamentable' condition of that country in his last unfinished novel, The Landleaguers.

Trollope had left London in 1880 and moved to Harting (near Petersfield), to what he called 'a little cottage here, just ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Life and Character
• 2 The Irish Novels and Stories
• 3 The Way They Lived Then
• 4 Barchester Chronicles
• 5 The Semi-Political Novels
• 6 Other Longer Novels, 1858-70
• 7 Shorter Novels, 1863-74
• 8 The Final Phase
• 9 Other Works
• 10 Conclusion: An Estimate
• A Note on La Vendée
• Bibliography
• Index