Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) was born in London into a family sliding from gentility into poverty — his father was a failed barrister, his mother the novelist Frances Trollope, who wrote Domestic Manners of the Americans — and became the most productive major novelist in the English language. He wrote forty-seven novels, five volumes of short stories, travel books, biographies, and an autobiography, all while working full-time for the Post Office, where he rose to a senior position and, incidentally, introduced the pillar box to Britain. His Barsetshire novels and Palliser series are the great institutional chronicles of Victorian England: panoramic, psychologically acute, and animated by a moral intelligence that grows more impressive with each rereading.

Life and Career

Trollope’s childhood was miserable. He attended Winchester and Harrow as a scholarship boy, bullied and neglected, wearing clothes his family could not afford to maintain. He described himself as “an idle, desolate hanger-on” and left school without distinction.

He joined the Post Office at nineteen and was sent to Ireland, where he found himself. He married Rose Heseltine in 1844, took up fox-hunting (which became his great passion), and began writing. His first two novels failed, but The Warden (1855) introduced the imaginary cathedral city of Barchester and the cast of clergymen — Archdeacon Grantly, Bishop Proudie, the saintly Mr Harding, the unctuous Mr Slope — who would populate six novels. Barchester Towers (1857) was a triumph.

The Barsetshire novels (The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, The Last Chronicle of Barset) are his most beloved works. The Palliser novels (Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, The Duke’s Children) are his greatest achievement: a sequence that takes the political novel to a depth and complexity no English novelist has surpassed.

Trollope wrote with industrial regularity: he rose at 5:30 AM, wrote 250 words every fifteen minutes with his watch before him, and completed his daily quota of 2,500 words before breakfast and the Post Office. If he finished a novel before the morning’s quota was complete, he began another. This method, described with characteristic honesty in his Autobiography (1883), damaged his posthumous reputation — critics felt that such mechanical production was incompatible with art. They were wrong.

Major Works and Themes

Trollope is the great novelist of institutions — the Church, Parliament, the law, the county — and of the people who navigate them. His characters are not extraordinary: they are ordinary people making ordinary compromises, driven by ambition, love, money, and social anxiety. His genius is to show how these mundane pressures produce genuine moral drama.

The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) — the story of the proud, impoverished Reverend Crawley, accused of stealing a cheque — is his masterpiece: a novel of almost unbearable suspense in which the drama is entirely psychological.

The Way We Live Now

The Way We Live Now (1875) stands apart from both sequences. A savage satire of the financialisation of mid-Victorian society, it centres on Augustus Melmotte — a mysterious financier of uncertain origins who buys his way into Parliament and London society through a fraudulent railway scheme. The novel was Trollope’s most Balzacian work and his most prescient: its portrait of a speculative bubble, a celebrity con man, and a society too dazzled by money to ask where it came from reads as prophetically in the twenty-first century as it did in the nineteenth. Henry James, not given to praising Trollope, called it a work of “greatly-engrossing” power.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Trollope was immensely popular in his lifetime, then suffered a catastrophic decline after the posthumous publication of his Autobiography (1883), which revealed his business-like writing methods. The Victorian and Edwardian literary establishment — which valued inspiration, suffering, and the appearance of effortless genius — could not forgive a novelist who wrote by the clock and admitted to caring about his income. Henry James had already delivered the judgement that stuck: Trollope had “a great apprehension of the real” but “his imagination had no great wings.”

The twentieth century rediscovered him. Michael Sadleir’s Trollope: A Commentary (1927) began the reassessment. C.P. Snow, Evelyn Waugh, and later John Sutherland all argued that Trollope is one of the finest English novelists — that his apparent artlessness conceals an extraordinarily sophisticated understanding of social psychology and narrative structure. His current reputation is very high — he is read with the seriousness once reserved for Dickens and Eliot, and the BBC’s Pallisers adaptation (1974) and subsequent television productions have introduced his world to new audiences.

Collecting Trollope

Trollope’s forty-seven novels were published by various houses — Chapman & Hall, Longmans, Smith Elder, and others. Many were first published in serial form.

The Warden (1855, Longman) is the first Barsetshire novel and the scarcest first edition: $1,000–$4,000.

Barchester Towers (1857, Longman, three volumes) in the original cloth is highly desirable: $2,000–$8,000 for a fine three-decker.

The three-volume novel format (“three-decker”) in original cloth is the primary collecting format for mid-Victorian fiction. Condition is paramount — these were circulating library copies and are often found in poor state.

The Way We Live Now (1875, Chapman & Hall, two volumes) is increasingly collected as Trollope’s most ambitious single novel: $500–$2,000.

Trollope manuscript material is largely institutional. His prolific output means that first editions of later novels are available at moderate prices.