Comprehensive information and links about Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope (April 24, 1815 – December 6, 1882) was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of Trollope's best-loved works, known as the Barsetshire Chronicles, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire, but he also wrote penetrating novels on political, social, and inter-gender issues and conflicts of his day.

Trollope's popularity continues into the present day (some famous fans being Sir Alec Guinness, who never travelled without a Trollope novel, ex-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Sir John Major, and American mystery novelist Sue Grafton); his literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, for reasons detailed below, but he had regained his foothold amongst critics somewhat by the mid-twentieth century.

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Biography

Anthony Trollope was born in London, the son of a barrister, Thomas Anthony Trollope, and his wife Frances, who would later become a successful writer. Thomas Trollope was a clever and well-educated man, a Fellow of New College, Oxford, but his bad temper led to failure at the bar, his ventures into farming were unprofitable, and he lost the inheritance on which he was counting when an elderly uncle married and started a family. Nonetheless he was from a genteel background, with connections to the landed gentry, and wished his sons to be educated as gentlemen and to attend Oxford or Cambridge. The conflict between his family's social background and its poverty was to cause misery to Anthony Trollope as a boy.

Anthony attended Harrow School as a day boy for three years from the age of seven, as his father's farm was in that neighbourhood. After a spell at a private school, he followed his father and two older brothers in attending Winchester College, where he stayed for three years. Finally he again returned to Harrow as a day boy to reduce the cost of his education. Trollope's experiences at these schools were very miserable. These are two of the most elite schools in England, but Trollope had no money and no friends, and was beaten a great deal. At the age of twelve he fantasised about suicide. However, he took to daydreaming instead, constructing elaborate inner worlds.

In 1827 Frances Trollope moved to America with Trollope's three younger siblings, where she opened a bazaar in Cincinnati, which was 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 practice at the bar entirely, and in 1834 he fled to Belgium to avoid being arrested for debt. The whole family moved to a house near Bruges, where they were entirely dependent on Frances's earnings. In 1835, Thomas Trollope died.

While he was in Belgium, Anthony worked as a Classics usher (that is, 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, but this only lasted six weeks. He then obtained a position as a civil servant in the Post Office through one of his mother's family connections, and returned to London on his own. This was a gentlemanly occupation, but not well paid. Trollope lived in boarding houses, and remained socially awkward; this was what he called his "hobbledehoyhood". He made little progress in his career until he was sent to work in Ireland in 1841. He married an Englishwoman named Rose Heseltine in 1844. They spent the early years of their marriage in Ireland, but later moved back to England.

On the numerous long train trips Trollope had to take to carry out his Post Office duties, he began writing, and set himself very firm goals about how much he would write per day, earning himself a reputation as one of the most prolific writers of his time. He wrote his earliest novels while working as a Post Office inspector, occasionally dipping into the "lost-letter" box for ideas (it is significant that many of his earliest novels have Ireland as their setting — natural enough given his background, but not likely to lead to a warm critical reception given the contemporary English attitudes towards Ireland). During the period of his employment as a Post Office official, Trollope is credited with having introduced the pillar box (a bright red mail box) in the United Kingdom.

By the mid-1860s Trollope had reached a fairly senior position at the Post Office, and was also earning a substantial income from his novels. He had overcome the awkwardness of his youth, and was well liked in literary circles; he was also an enthusiastic huntsman. He left the Post Office in 1867, and after failing in a bid for election to Parliament as a Liberal candidate in 1868, he concentrated entirely on his literary career. As well as continuing to produce novels rapidly, he worked as editor of the (1855) — the first in the series of six novels set in the fictional county of "Barsetshire" (often referred to as the (1857).

Trollope's other major sequence of novels, the Palliser series, deals with politics, mainly in the shape of Plantagenet Palliser (although, like the Barsetshire series, many other characters feature in each novel). Also noteworthy are

Trollope's popularity and contemporary critical success diminished in his later years, but he continued to write prolifically, and some of his later novels are now highly regarded. By the time of his death Trollope had completed approximately four dozen novels, as well as dozens of short stories and a few books on travel.

Anthony Trollope died in London in 1882, and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, where his contemporary Wilkie Collins is also buried.

C. P. Snow wrote a biography of Trollope, published in 1975, called appeared. It was largely this volume that led to Trollope's downfall with the critics. Even during his writing career, reviewers of his books tended increasingly to shake their heads over his prodigious output (and the same went for Charles Dickens), but when Trollope revealed that he actually adhered to a definite schedule, he confirmed his critics' worst fears. The Muse, in their view, just possibly be immensely prolific, but she would never work on schedule. (Interestingly, no-one has decried Gustave Flaubert for diligence, though he too worked on a schedule-scheme similar to Trollope's.) Worse, Trollope admitted that he wrote for money, and called the disdain of money false and foolish. The Muse should not be aware of money, claimed the critics.

Henry James drove the final nail into the coffin of Trollope's reputation. The young James wrote some scathing reviews of Trollope's novels (, for instance, he called "a stupid book, without a single thought or idea in it ... a sort of mental pablum"). He also made it clear that he despised Trollope's narrative method; a real novel, in James's view, should maintain "the fiction of fiction", and never talk as if the made-up characters actually were made up. Nor would the reliable narrator have appealed to James's tastes. As trends in the world of the novel moved increasingly towards subjectivity, James's views and, more importantly, modern ideas on the novel in general, assured that Trollope would remain obscure for decades. In the 1940s attempts were made to resurrect Trollope; he enjoyed a critical Renaissance in the 1960s, and again in the 1990s. Critics today are particularly interested in Trollope's portrayal of women — which caused remark even in his own day for his remarkable insight and sensitivity to the inner conflicts caused by the constrained position of women in Victorian society. But the understanding that critics find largely in Trollope's portrayal of women, readers find in Trollope's portrayals of human beings in general.

A Trollope Society flourishes in the United Kingdom.

Trollope on television

The British Broadcasting Corporation has made several television drama serials based on the works of Anthony Trollope:

, a twenty-six-episode adaptation of all six Palliser novels, first broadcast in 1974. Adapted by Simon Raven; starred Philip Latham as Plantagenet Palliser and Susan Hampshire as Lady Glencora.

. Adapted by Alan Plater, it starred Donald Pleasance as the Reverend Septimus Harding, Nigel Hawthorne as Archdeacon Grantly, and Alan Rickman as the Reverend Obadiah Slope.

, 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.

All three have been shown in the United States on PBS; in four sixty-minute episodes began on April 18, 2004 on BBC One. It was produced by BBC Wales, and starred, amongst others, Bill Nighy, Laura Fraser, David Tennant, and Geoffrey Palmer.

, the fifth novel of the Chronicles of Barsetshire, which was broadcast in 1993. The response of listeners was so positive that adaptations of the five remaining novels of the series were commissioned and the complete series broadcast on BBC Radio 4 between December 1995 and March 1998. In this adaptation, the part of Archdeacon Grantley was played by Stephen Moore. A serialised radio adaptation of The Kellys and the O'Kellys, starring Derek Jacobi, was broadcast on BBC Radio4 between 21 Nov 1982 and 2 Jan 1983.

, a new twelve-part adaptation of the Palliser novels, was broadcast on Radio 4 from January to April 2004, in the weekend

Quotations

"Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic." — W. H. Auden