Anthony Trollope was born on 24 April 1815 in London. He was the fourth surviving child of a failing barrister and gentleman farmer, Thomas Anthony Trollope, and his wife Frances (née Milton), who became a successful novelist and travel writer. Trollope’s childhood was dominated by uncongenial schooling. He was sent to Harrow, the boys’ public school in north London, as a day boy, then to Sunbury, Surrey, while awaiting a place at his father’s former school, Winchester College. Trollope was admitted to Winchester in 1827, but his father’s embarrassing inability to pay the fees became known to fellow pupils. He was moved back from Winchester to Harrow in 1830 for two further years, which he later described as ‘the worst period of my life’.1 Unsurprisingly, he did not shine academically, and when, in 1834, the whole family fled to Bruges in Belgium to avoid imprisonment for debt, he obtained a clerkship in the London headquarters of the newly-created Post Office through his mother’s connections.
The beginning of Trollope’s long Post Office career was not encouraging. He soon became known for unpunctuality, and was, by his own account, ‘always on the eve of being dismissed’.2 His scanty salary led him into debt, and travails with money-lenders would later inform the scrapes of many fictional characters. Trollope was sustained by a habit of imagination that was first acquired during his unhappy adolescence. Daydreaming not only allowed him ‘to live in a world altogether outside the world of my own material life’:3 it served as an apprenticeship for fiction. Yet it took a change of scene from London to rural Ireland to persuade Trollope to express his imagination in writing.
In July 1841, aged 26, Trollope was appointed deputy postal surveyor’s clerk, based in Banagher, King’s County (now Co. Offaly). His new-found professional success helped him to grow in social confidence. Ireland prompted his lifelong enthusiasm for hunting with hounds, too. That enthusiasm was never far from his writing, and sometimes it made life difficult for him at work, not least because hounds and horses were an expensive pastime. Within a year, he became engaged to Rose Heseltine, the daughter of a Rotherham banker who was holidaying in what is now Dun Laoghaire. Trollope proposed after barely a fortnight’s acquaintance. The wedding was, for financial reasons, postponed for two years until 11 June 1844. Marriage and the birth of two sons, Henry Merivale in 1846 and Frederick James Anthony in 1847, helped Trollope to find what he called the ‘vigour necessary to prosecute two professions at the same time’.4 His first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847), sold far fewer than the 400 copies printed. But it was favourably reviewed and was followed by a second Irish tale, The Kellys and the O’Kellys (1848). Both kept an uneasy silence on the Famine, to which Trollope was a horrified witness, but his recollections of the famine years would inform the later Castle Richmond (1860). The failure of La Vendée (1850), on the French Revolution, together with the increasing demands of his Post Office career, conspired to deflect Trollope from fiction for some years.
In 1851, he was sent to the south-west of England to investigate ways of expanding the rural postal system. His successful development of the pillar box, which he first tried out in St Helier in the Channel Islands in 1852, led to the spread of post boxes throughout the UK. The project won Trollope promotion to the surveyorship of the north of Ireland in 1854, and his family settled in Donnybrook. During these years, he composed the first novel to bring him real recognition, The Warden (1855). The first of six ‘Chronicles of Barsetshire’, The Warden was set, like its successors, in a fictional county, based on the south-west England Trollope knew. Although they dramatized changes in the ecclesiastical world, the ‘Chronicles’ were also secular in their interests. While The Warden brought him less than £10, Trollope ‘soon felt it had not failed as the others had failed’,5 and began work on Barchester Towers (1857). It was warmly reviewed. But it was not until the publication of Dr Thorne (1858) that he met with unmixed success. The novels following — Framley Parsonage (1861), The Small House at Allington (1864), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) — established his reputation, his popularity, and his fortune.
During the twelve years between The Warden and The Last Chronicle, Trollope published seventeen novels, numerous short stories, and several collections of travel writing. This extraordinary scale of production was sustained by his habit of rising at five each morning to allow three hours of writing — 250 words each quarter of an hour, he boasted in An Autobiography — before leaving for the office at nine. Other celebrated writers have written to a similar schedule, but Trollope’s pride in his achievement has never been entirely admired by critics. His schedule made him an invaluable contributor to the Cornhill Magazine, founded in 1859 by the novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray. The serialization of Framley Parsonage in the Cornhill’s first issues did much to secure the magazine’s and Trollope’s reputation. Through the Cornhill, he made lasting friendships with major literary and artistic figures. By 1859, he was living in the north London suburb of Waltham Cross, after a promotion to Post Office surveyor of the eastern district. He was soon elected to the Garrick and Athenaeum Clubs, and became a stalwart of the Royal Literary Fund. These were marks of serious literary success. He also, in 1860, met a young American woman, Kate Field, with whom he fell in love. The nature of that relationship is known almost as little as Trollope’s relationship with Rose. But Kate mattered to him — and would do till the end of his life.
Trollope concluded the Barsetshire Chronicles on a high note, considering The Last Chronicle of Barset to be his best novel. Following the model of Honoré de Balzac’s Comédie humaine, Trollope saw realist fiction as capable of depicting a complex culture through a multi-volume series. The Palliser volumes, beginning with Can You Forgive Her? (1865) and ending with The Duke’s Children (1880), were his other major sequence. These novels, like the Barsetshire Chronicles, could be read separately and in different orders without irrecoverable loss — but they formed a continuous whole all the same. In the story of the Pallisers, Trollope developed one of his strongest themes — the difficult marriage and its negotiations. He also explored great political issues, including the 1867 Reform Bill and the disestablishment of the Irish Church, while inviting readers to map the Conservative leader Daubeny onto Disraeli, and the Liberal Gresham onto Gladstone. His portrayal of democratic politics has remained consequential for generations. The novels’ political appeal, nonetheless, was carefully balanced against other enticements: ‘If I wrote politics for my own sake, I must put in love and intrigue, social incidents, a dash of sport, for the sake of my readers’,6 he said, with characteristic pragmatism.
Trollope resigned from the Post Office in 1867. His earnings from writing had long outstripped his salary. The following year, feeling that ‘to sit in the British Parliament should be the highest object of ambition to every educated Englishman’,7 he stood as the Liberal candidate for Beverley in the 1868 General Election. He was unsuccessful. That failure haunted his fiction as it must have haunted his private life. Trollope interspersed the Palliser series with other novels and studies. He was by this stage a professional writer whose commitment was broken significantly only by field sports and travel. Trollope’s international voyages included Australia, where Frederick, his younger son, was a sheep farmer: Australia and New Zealand (1873) was a result. Trollope and Rose left London in 1880 for South Harting in Sussex, hoping country air would ease his persistent asthma. This was no retirement: the last two years of his life saw a further six books, including Mr Scarborough’s Family (1883), a study of parental domination, and the unfinished The Landleaguers, a return to Irish matters (published posthumously, 1883).
In early November 1882, Trollope suffered a stroke, and, on 6 December, he died in London at the age of 67. He had written fortyseven novels, five volumes of short stories, four travel books, three biographies, an autobiography, and two translations from the classics, together with uncollected pieces of journalism. His prodigious output included a biography of Thackeray, and a study of Cicero whose political judiciousness was often a silent model behind his admirable fictional politicians. Few who knew Trollope could avoid commenting on his loud and bluff persona in public: at 5 ft 10 in., and around 16 stones, he struck those who met him as burly — a man of bodily appetites. It was difficult for many to imagine him dissecting the emotional complexities of his characters with such delicacy and sympathy.
Trollope’s posthumous An Autobiography (1883) startled a large number of readers. Its dry discussion of how much money his fiction made denied any Romantic model of authorship. Here was no account of the creative flash of inspiration. Writing fiction was more like a trade, the result of well-applied skill and labour. But, knowing at first hand the cost of his father’s failure, it was important to Trollope to demonstrate to his family, if to no one else, that he had made such a success of his life. He had no university degree, and was without the much-coveted honour of a seat in Parliament. He wished to demonstrate too, in a culture less familiar with the notion of a professional writer than ours, that writing could indeed be a life. His estate was valued at the huge sum of £25,892 19s. 3d.
Biographies of Trollope are always to some degree doomed to follow the sparse facts laid out in An Autobiography. The nature of his marriage, his feelings for Kate Field, his relationship with his sons, let alone the secrets of his inner life, are among the topics on which it is impossible to write with certainty. Trollope had no commitment to privacy — but private he remains. Declining to reveal himself in correspondence, he is, perhaps, only glimpsed in the astonishingly fertile novels about human lives, desires, and choices, which were his enduring bequest to English literature.
Katherine Mullin
Francis O’Gorman