Anthony Trollope
Anthony Trollope was an English novelist and civil servant of the Victorian era. Among the best-known of his 47 novels are two series of six novels each collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire and the Palliser novels, as well as his longest novel, The Way We Live Now. His novels address political, social, and gender issues and other topical matters. He also wrote an autobiography, a book on William Makepeace Thackeray, a book on Lord Palmerston, five travel books, and 42 short stories.
Trollope's literary reputation dipped during the last years of his life, but he regained somewhat of a following by the mid-20th century.
Biography
Anthony Trollope was the son of barrister Thomas Anthony Trollope and the novelist and travel writer Frances Milton Trollope. Though a clever and well-educated man and a Fellow of New College, Oxford, Thomas Trollope failed at the Bar due to his bad temper. Ventures into farming proved unprofitable, and his expectations of inheritance were dashed when an elderly, childless uncle remarried and fathered children. Thomas Trollope was the son of the Rev. Anthony Trollope, rector of Cottered, Hertfordshire, himself the sixth son of Sir Thomas Trollope, 4th Baronet. The baronetcy later came to descendants of Anthony Trollope's second son, Frederic. As a son of landed gentry, Thomas Trollope wanted his sons raised as gentlemen who would attend Oxford or Cambridge. Anthony suffered much misery in his boyhood, owing to the disparity between the privileged background of his parents and their comparatively meagre means.Born in Marylebone, Anthony Trollope attended Harrow School as a day pupil for three years, beginning at age seven, without paying fees because his father's farm, acquired for that purpose, lay in the neighbourhood. After a spell at a private school at Sunbury, he followed his father and two older brothers to Winchester College, where he remained for three years. He then returned to Harrow as a day-boy to reduce his education costs. With no money or friends at these two high-ranked elite public schools, Trollope was bullied a great deal, enduring miserable experiences. At the age of 12, he fantasised about suicide. He also sought refuge in daydreams, constructing elaborate imaginary worlds.
In 1827, his mother, Frances Trollope, moved to America, to the Nashoba Commune in Tennessee, along with his three younger siblings. After that venture failed, she opened a bazaar in Cincinnati, Ohio, which also failed. Thomas Trollope joined them for a short time before returning to the farm at Harrow, but Anthony stayed in England throughout.
Anthony Trollope's 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 rent 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 Belgium, Anthony Trollope was offered a commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment. To accept it, he needed to learn French and German; he had a year in which to do so. To acquire these languages without expense to himself and his family, he became an usher in a school in Brussels, making him the tutor of 30 boys. After six weeks there, however, he was offered a clerkship in the General Post Office, obtained through a family friend. Accepting this post, he returned to London in the autumn of 1834. Thomas Trollope died the following year.
According to Anthony Trollope, "the first seven years of my official life were neither creditable to myself nor useful to the public service." At the Post Office, he acquired a reputation for unpunctuality and insubordination. A debt of £12 to a tailor fell into the hands of a moneylender and grew to more than £200; the lender regularly visited Trollope at his workplace to demand payments. Trollope hated his job, but he saw no alternative to it and lived in constant fear of dismissal.
Move to Ireland
In 1841, an opportunity to escape arose. A postal surveyor clerk in central Ireland, reported as incompetent, needed replacement. The position was not regarded as desirable, but Trollope, in debt and in trouble at work, volunteered for it; and his supervisor, William Maberly, a Whig politician eager to be rid of him, appointed him to the position.Trollope's new work consisted largely of inspection tours in Connaught, and he based himself in Banagher in King's County. Although he had arrived with a bad reference from London, his new supervisor resolved to judge him on his merits, and within a year, by Trollope's account, he earned a reputation as a valuable public servant. His salary and travel allowance went much further in Ireland than they had in London, and he found himself enjoying a measure of prosperity. He took up fox hunting, which he would pursue enthusiastically for the next three decades. As a post-office surveyor, he interacted with local Irish people, whose company he found pleasant: "The Irish people did not 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."
At the watering place of Kingstown, Trollope met Rose Heseltine, the daughter of a Rotherham bank manager. They became engaged when he had been in Ireland for just a year, but Trollope's debts and her lack of a fortune prevented them from marrying until 1844. Soon after they wed, Trollope was transferred to another postal district in the south of Ireland, and the family moved to Clonmel. Their first son, Henry Merivale, was born in 1846, and their second, Frederick James Anthony, in 1847.
Early works
Though Trollope had decided to become a novelist, he had accomplished very little writing during his first three years in Ireland. At the time of his marriage, he had written only the first of three volumes of his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran. Within a year of his marriage, he finished that work.Trollope began writing on the numerous long train trips around Ireland he had to take to carry out his postal duties. Setting 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.
Significantly, many of his earliest novels have Ireland as their setting—natural enough given that he wrote them or thought them up while he was living and working in Ireland, but unlikely to enjoy warm critical reception, given the contemporary English attitude towards Ireland. Critics have pointed out that Trollope's view of Ireland separates him from many of the other Victorian novelists. Other critics claimed 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 Great Famine during his time there. However, these critics failed or refused to acknowledge both Trollope's true attachment to the country and the country's capacity as a rich literary field.
Trollope published four novels about Ireland. Two were written during the Great Famine, while the third deals with the famine as a theme. The Macdermots of Ballycloran was written while he was staying in the village of Drumsna, County Leitrim. The Kellys and the O'Kellys is a humorous comparison of the romantic pursuits of the landed gentry and his Catholic tenant. Two short stories deal with Ireland. Some critics argue that these works seek to unify an Irish and British identity, instead of viewing the two as distinct. 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.
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." In particular, magazines such as The New Monthly Magazine, which included reviews that attacked the Irish for their actions during the famine, were representative of the dismissal by English readers of any work written about the Irish.
Success as an author
In 1851, Trollope was sent to England, charged with investigating and reorganising rural mail delivery in southwestern England and south Wales. The two-year mission took him over much of Great Britain, often on horseback. Trollope describes the time as being "two of the happiest years of my life".In the course of it, he visited Salisbury Cathedral; and there, according to his autobiography, he conceived the plot of The Warden, which became the first of the six Barsetshire novels. His postal work delayed the beginning of writing for a year; the novel was published in 1855, in an edition of 1,000 copies, with Trollope receiving half of the profits: £9 8s. 8d. in 1855, and £10 15s. 1d. in 1856. Although the profits were not large, the book received notices in the press and brought Trollope to the attention of the novel-reading public.
File:Anthony Trollope - DPLA - 3cb446f8e59a5e92fb88e4fa716f1941.jpg|alt=Photograph of Anthony Trollope leaning against a chair, his right leg crossed over the left. His name is written in ink at the base of the image.|thumb|Anthony Trollope, ; Carte de Visite Collection, Boston Public Library
He immediately began work on Barchester Towers, the second Barsetshire novel; upon its publication in 1857, he received an advance payment of £100 against his share of the profits. Like The Warden, Barchester Towers did not obtain large sales, but it helped to establish Trollope's reputation. In his autobiography, Trollope writes, "It achieved no great reputation, but it was one of the novels which novel readers were called upon to read." For the following novel, The Three Clerks, he was able to sell the copyright for a lump sum of £250 ; he preferred this to waiting for a share of future profits.