| 171st | Top English writers |
| Anthony Trollope | |
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![]() Anthony Trollope |
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| Born | April 24, 1815 London, United Kingdom |
| Died | 6 December 1882 (aged 67) London, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | English |
| Occupation | novelist |
Anthony Trollope (24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882) was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works — known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire (e.g., Barchester Towers [1857], Framley Parsonage [1861]) — revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire. He also wrote penetrating novels on political, social, and gender issues, and on other topical 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
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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[1] 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 General 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.
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 (mostly in Banagher, County Offaly) until 1859, when they moved back to England.[2]
Despite the calamity of the Great Famine in Ireland, Trollope wrote of his time in Ireland in his own autobiography:
His professional role as a post-office surveyor brought him into contact with Irish people.[4] Trollope began writing on the numerous long train trips around Ireland he had to take to carry out his postal duties. Setting very firm goals about how much he would 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.[5]
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.[6] It has been pointed out by critics that Trollope's view of Ireland separates him from many of the other Victorian novelists.[6] Some critics claim that Ireland did not 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 famine during his time there.[7] Such critics were dismissed as holding bigoted opinions against Ireland and did not reflect Trollope's true attachment to the country.[6][8]
Trollope wrote four novels about Ireland. 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).[9] The Macdermots of Ballycloran was written while he was staying in the village of Drumsna, County Leitrim.[10] A fourth, The Kellys and the O'Kellys (1848) is a humorous comparison of the romantic pursuits of the landed gentry (Francis O'Kelly, Lord Ballindine) and his Catholic tenant (Martin Kelly). Two short stories deal with Ireland ("The O'Conors of Castle Conor, County Mayo"[11] and "Father Giles of Ballymoy" [12]).[13] It has been argued by some critics that these works seek to unify an Irish and British identity, instead of viewing the two as distinct.[14] Even as an Englishman in Ireland, Trollope was still able to attain what he saw as essential to being an "Irish writer": possessed, obsessed, and "mauled" by Ireland.[14][15]
The reception of the Irish works left much to be desired. Henry Colburn wrote to Trollope, "It is evident that readers do not like novels on Irish subjects as well as on others".[16] In particular, magazines such as New Monthly Magazine, which 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.[17][18]
Trollope himself wrote, about Phineas Finn's identity as an Irishman:
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.
In 1871, Trollope made his first trip to Australia, arriving in Melbourne in July, with his wife and their cook. The trip was made to visit their younger son, Frederic, who was a sheep farmer near Grenfell, New South Wales.[20] He wrote his novel Lady Anna during the voyage.[20] He spent a year and two days "descending mines, mixing with shearers and rouseabouts, riding his horse into the loneliness of the bush, touring lunatic asylums, and exploring coast and plain by steamer and stagecoach".[21] Despite this, the Australian press was uneasy, fearing he would misrepresent Australia in his writings. This fear was based on rather negative writings about America by his mother, Fanny, and by Charles Dickens. On his return Trollope published a book, Australia and New Zealand (1873). It contained both positive and negative comments. On the positive side it included finding a comparative absence of class consciousness, and praising aspects of Perth, Melbourne, Hobart and Sydney.[21] However, he was negative about Adelaide's river, the towns of Bendigo and Ballarat, and the Aboriginal people. What most angered the Australian papers, though, were his comments "accusing Australians of being braggarts".[21]
When Trollope returned to Australia in 1875 to help his son close down his failed farming business, he found that the resentment created by his bragging accusations remained and, when he died in 1882, Australian papers still "smouldered".[22] In their obituaries they referred yet again to his accusations, and refused to fully praise or recognise his achievements.[22]
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[citation needed]), 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 would 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.[citation needed]) 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, should not 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 did not 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 is not poor."
James disliked Trollope's habit of 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.[citation needed]
Writers such as Thackeray, Eliot and Collins admired and befriended Trollope, and George Eliot noted that she could not 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.[citation needed]
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 deep insight and sensitivity to the inner conflicts caused by the position of women in Victorian society[citation needed]. 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.
The British Broadcasting Corporation has made several television-drama serials based on the works of Anthony Trollope:
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.
Novels unless otherwise noted:
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Anthony Trollope (1815-04-24 – 1882-12-06) was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE (1815-1882), English novelist, was born in London, on the 24th of April 1815. His father, Thomas Anthony Trollope (1780-1835), a barrister who had been fellow of New College, Oxford, was reduced to poverty by unbusinesslike habits and injudicious speculation, and in 1829 Anthony's mother, Frances Milton Trollope (1780-1863), went with her husband to the United States to open a small fancy-goods shop in Cincinnati. The enterprise was a failure, but her three years' stay in that country resulted in a book on the Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), of which she gave an unflattering account that aroused keen resentment. Returning to England her husband was compelled to flee the country in order to escape his creditors, and Mrs Trollope thereafter supported him in Bruges until his death by her incessant literary work. She published some books of travel, most of which are coloured by prejudice, and many novels, among the best known of which are The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837) and the Widow Barnaby (1839), studies in that vein of broad comedy in which lay her peculiar gift. She wrote steadily for more than twenty years, until her death, at Florence, on the 6th of October 1863. (See Frances Trollope, her Life and Literary Work, by her daughter-in-law 1895.) Her eldest SOD Thomas Adolphus Trollope (1810-1892), was educated at Winchester and Oxford, and spent most of his life in Italy. He wrote a number of works on Italian subjects, among them Homes and Haunts of Italian Poets (1881), in collaboration with his second wife, Frances Eleanor Trollope, herself a novelist of no mean ability. He was a voluminous author, and perhaps the quantity of his work has obscured its real merit. Among his novels are La Beata (1861) Gemma (1866), and The Garstangs of Garstang Grange (1869). (See his autobiography, What I Remember 1887.) Anthony Trollope was the third son. By his own account few English men of letters have had an unhappier childhood and youth. He puts down his own misfortunes, at Harrow, at Winchester, at Harrow again, and elsewhere, to his father's pecuniary circumstances, which made his own appearance dirty and shabby, and subjected him to various humiliations. But it is permissible to suspect that this was not quite the truth, and that some peculiarities of temper, of which in after life he had many, contributed to his unpopularity. At any rate he seems to have reached the verge of manhood as ignorant as if he had had no education at all. After an experience as usher in a private school at Brussels he obtained, at the age of nineteen, by favour (for he could not pass even the ridiculous examination then usual) a position in the London post office. Even then his troubles were not over. He got into debt; he got into ridiculous entanglements of love affairs, which he has very candidly avowed; he was in constant hot water with the authorities; and he seems to have kept some very queer company, which long afterwards stood him in good stead as models for some of his novels. At last in August 1841 he obtained the appointment of clerk to one of the post office surveyors in a remote part of Ireland with a very small salary. This, however, was practically quadrupled by allowances; living was cheap; and the life suited Trollope exactly, being not office work, which he always hated, but a kind of travelling inspectorship. In the discharge of his duties he evinced a business capacity quite unsuspected by his former superiors. Here he began that habit of hunting which, after a manner hardly possible in later conditions of official work, he kept up for many years even in England. Within three years of his appointment he became engaged to Rose Heseltine, whom he had met in Ireland but who was of English birth. They were married in June 1844. His headquarters had previously been at Banagher; he was now transferred to Clonmel.
Trollope had always dreamt of novel-writing, and his Irish experiences seemed to supply him with promising subjects. With some assistance from his mother he got published his first two books, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) and The Kellys and the O'Kellys (1848). Neither was in the least a success, though the second perhaps deserved to be, and a third, La Vendee (1850), besides being a much worse book than either, was equally a failure. Trollope made various literary attempts, but for a time ill fortune attended all of them. Meanwhile he was set on a new kind of post office work, which suited him even better than his former employment - a sort of roving commission to inspect rural deliveries and devise their extension, first in Ireland, then throughout the west of England and South Wales. That he did good work is undeniable; but his curious conception of official duty, on his discharge of which he prided himself immensely, is exhibited by his confessions that he "got his hunting out of it," and that he felt "the necessity of travelling miles enough" - he was paid by the mileage - "to keep his horses." It was during this work that he struck the vein which gave him fortune and fame. A visit to Salisbury Close inspired him with the idea of The Warden (1855). It brought him little immediate profit, nor was even Barchester Towers, which followed in 1857, very profitable, though it contains his freshest, his most original, and, with the exception of The Last Chronicle of Barset, his best work. The two made him a reputation, however, and in 1858 he was able for the first time to sell a novel, The Three Clerks, for a substantial sum, £250. A journey on post office business to the West Indies gave him material for a book of travel, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1859), which he frankly and quite truly acknowledges to be much better than some subsequent work of his in the same line. From this time his production, mainly of novels, was incessant, and the sums which he received were very large, amounting in one case to as much as £35 2 5 for a single book, and to nearly £70,000 in the twenty years between 1859 and 1879. All these particulars are given with great minuteness by himself, and are characteristic. The full high tide of his fortunes began when the Cornhill Magazine was established. He was asked at short notice to contribute a novel, and wrote in 1861 Framley Parsonage, which was extremely popular; two novels immediately preceding it, The Bertrams (1859) and Castle Richmond (1860), had been much less successful.
As it will be possible to notice few of his other works, the list of them, a sufficiently astonishing one, may be given here: Doctor Thorne (1858); Tales of All Countries (3rd series 1863); Orley Farm; North America (1862); Rachael Ray (1863); The Small House at Allington, Can You Forgive Her? (1864); Miss Mackenzie (1865); The Belton Estate (1866); The Claverings, Nina Balatka, The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867); Linda Tressel (1868); Phineas Finn, He Knew He Was Right (1869); The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson, the Vicar of Bullhampton, An Editor's Tales, The Commentaries of Caesar (1870); Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, Ralph the Heir (1871); The Golden Lion of Granpere (1872); The Eustace Diamonds, Australia and New Zealand (1873); Phineas Redux, Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, Lady Anna (1874); The Way We Live Now (1875); The Prime Minister (1876); The American Senator (1877); Is He Popenjoy? South Africa (1878); John Caldigate, An Eye for an Eye, Cousin Henry, Thackeray (1879); The Duke's Children, Cicero (1880); Ayala's Angel, Dr Wortle's School (1881); Frau Frohmann, Lord Palmerston, The Fixed Period, Kept in the Dark, Marion Fay (1882); Mr Scarborough's Family, The Land Leaguers (1883); and An Old Man's Love (1884), and several volumes of short stories.
How this enormous total was achieved in spite of official work (of which, lightly as he took it, he did a good deal, and which he did not give up for many years), of hunting three times a week in the season, of whist-playing, of not a little going into general society, he has explained with his usual curious minuteness. He reduced novel-writing to the conditions of regular mechanical work - so much so that latterly he turned out 250 words every quarter of an hour, and wrote at this rate three hours a day. He divided every book beforehand into so many days' work and checked off the amount as he wrote.
A life thus spent could not be very eventful, and its events may be summed up rapidly. In 1858 he went to Egypt on post office business, and at the end of 1859 he got himself transferred from Ireland to the eastern district of England. Here he took a house, at Waltham. He took an active part in the establishment of the Fortnightly Review in 1865; he was editor of St Paul's for some time after 1867; and at the end of that year he resigned his position in the post office. He stood as a parliamentary candidate for Beverley and was defeated; he received from his old department special missions to America and elsewhere - he had already gone to America during the Civil War. He went to Australia in 1871, and before going broke up his household at Waltham. When he returned he established himself in London, and lived there until 1880, when he removed to Harting, on the confines of Sussex and Hampshire. He had visited South Africa in 1877 and travelled elsewhere. He died of paralysis on the 6th of December 1882.
Of Trollope's personal character it is not necessary to say much. Strange as his conception of official duty may seem, it was evidently quite honest and sincere, and, though he is said to have been as an official popular neither with superiors nor inferiors, he no doubt did much good work. Privately he was much liked and much disliked - a great deal of real kindness being accompanied by a blustering and overbearing manner, and an egotism, not perhaps more deep than other men's, but more vociferous. None of his literary work except the novels is remarkable for merit. His Caesar and Cicero are curious examples of a man's undertaking work for which he was not in the least fitted. Thackeray exhibits, though Trollope appears to have both admired Thackeray as an artist and liked him as a man, grave faults of taste and judgment, and a complete lack of real criticism. The books of travel are not good, and of a kind not good. Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel - stories dealing with Prague and Nuremberg respectively - were published anonymously and as experiments in the romantic style. They have been better thought of by the author and by some competent judges than by the public or the publishers. The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson was still more disliked, and is certainly very bad as a whole, but has touches of curious originality in parts. Trollope seldom creates a character of the first merit; at the same time his characters are always alive. Dr Thorne, Mr Harding, who has the courage to resign his sinecure in The Warden, Mr Crawley, Archdeacon Grantley, and Mrs Proudie in the same ecclesiastical series, are distinct additions to the personae of English fiction. After his first failures he never produced anything that was not a faithful and sometimes a very amusing transcript of the sayings and doings of possible men and women. His characters are never marionettes, much less sticks. He has some irritating mannerisms, notably a trick of repetition of the same form of words. He is sometimes absolutely vulgar - that is to say, he does not deal with low life, but shows, though always robust and pure in morality, a certain coarseness of taste. He is constantly rather trivial, and perhaps nowhere out of the Barset series (which, however, is of itself no inconsiderable work) has he produced books that will live. The very faithfulness of his representation of a certain phase of thought, of cultivation, of society, uninformed as it is by any higher spirit, in the long run damaged, as it had first helped, the popularity of his work. But, allowing for all this it may and must still be said that he held up his mirror steadily to nature, and that the mirror itself was fashioned with no inconsiderable art.
Trollope wrote an Autobiography, edited by his son Henry M. Trollope in 1883, explaining his literary methods with amusing frankness. See also Sir L. Stephen's Studies of a Biographer (1898), James Bryce's Studies in Contemporary Biography (1903), and Henry James's Partial Portraits (1888).
Categories: TRO-TZE | English writers
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