sneer, / And one on a milliner’s snivel.’ The historian may have been piqued by their
popularity.
Anthony Trollope
Like Thackeray,Anthony Trollope(1815–1882) came down in the world and wrote.
Each week he wrote 40 pages, each of 250 words, often while travelling for the Post
Office by train or ship. His Autobiography says that he began a new novel the day
after finishing the last. In twenty years his novels earned £68,939 17s. 5d., which he
thought ‘comfortable, but not splendid’.
Trollope presents himself as a workman proud of his work, but his demystifica-
tion of the business of writing upset the sensitive. He was robustly English, devoted
to fox-hunting and cigars, taking his own bath with him on his travels. By 1900,
when highbrows and middlebrows had drawn apart, aesthetes and intellectuals
shrank from Trollope’s confidence. Yet Newman and George Eliot had admired him.
His affectionate, temperate, good-humoured picture of an innocent rural social
order has today a nostalgia which gilds its original charm. But Trollope was no naïf:
he did not live in a cathedral close, and should not be confused with Septimus
Harding, Barchester’s Warden, still less with Archdeacon Grantly. Most of his books
are set in London. He lived in Ireland for eighteen years, and travelled more than any
other 19th-century writer, in Europe, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. He was a
worker, a go-ahead civil servant and a moderate reformer, standing for Parliament
as a Liberal in 1869.
A sample of Trollope’s comedy comes early in Barchester Towers. At the inaugural
reception organized by his wife, the Evangelical Bishop Proudie is accosted by Bertie,
the son of the Reverend Vesey Stanhope, whom the new bishop has recalled from
long residence in Italy. Proudie, mistaking Bertie for an Italian Prince, is initially
impressed: ‘There was just a twang of a foreign accent, and no more.’
‘Do you like Barchester on the whole?’ asked Bertie.
The bishop, looking dignified, said that he did like Barchester.
‘You’ve not been here very long, I believe,’ said Bertie.
‘No – not long,’ said the bishop, and tried again to make his way between the back of
the sofa and a heavy rector, who was staring over it at the grimaces of the signora.
‘You weren’t a bishop before, were you?’
Dr Proudie explained that this was the first diocese he had held.
‘A h – I thought so,’ said Bertie; ‘but you are changed about sometimes, a’nt you?’
‘Translations are occasionally made,’ said Dr Proudie; ‘but not so frequently as in
former days.’
‘They’ve cut them all down to pretty nearly the same figure, haven’t they?’ said
Bertie.
To this the bishop could not bring himself to make any answer, but again attempted
to move the rector.
‘But the work, I suppose, is different?’ continued Bertie. ‘Is there much to do here, at
Barchester?’ This was said exactly in the tone that a young Admiralty clerk might use in
asking the same question of a brother acolyte at the Treasury.
‘The work of a bishop of the Church of England,’ said Dr Proudie, with considerable
dignity, ‘is not easy. The responsibility which he has to bear is very great indeed.’
‘Is it?’ said Bertie, opening wide his wonderful blue eyes. ‘Well; I never was afraid of
responsibility. I once had thoughts of being a bishop, myself.’
‘Had thoughts of being a bishop!’ said Dr Proudie, much amazed.THE TRIUMPH OF THE NOVEL 299Anthony Trollope
(1815–1882) Son of a
failed barrister and Frances
Trollope, author of The
Domestic Manners of the
Americans(1832). Educated
at Winchester and Harrow. A
clerk in the General Post
Office from 1834, he moved
to Ireland in 1841, returned
in 1859, and retired in 1867.
The Warden(1855),
Barchester Towers(1857), Dr
Thorne(1858), Framley
Parsonage(1861), The Small
House at Allington(1864) and
The Last Chronicle of Barset
(1867) are the Barsetshire
Novels. Can You Forgive Her?
(1864), Phineas Finn(1869),
The Eustace Diamonds
(1873), Phineas Redux
(1876), The Prime Minister
(1876) and The Duke’s
Children(1880) are the
Palliser Novels. Others include
The Way We Live Now(1875).