A Favourite Author: Anthony Trollope

Even among the big beasts of Victorian novelists, Trollope has lasted magnificently. Most of his novels are currently in paperback, and adaptations of both his Barchester and his Palliser novels have repeatedly shown how well his dialogue works for television and radio. As a parson who has lived and worked in cathedral closes, I can myself vouch for the accuracy of his understanding of those intriguing places and institutions, and friends occupied in politics and the law also say how they marvel at his insights.

This is the clue to his lasting appeal. Trollope's brilliance does not shine in his handling of plot or in his portrayal of the outer surfaces of his age, though in both he is often masterly. It is in knowing how, in his world and ours, men and women interact not only when they are falling in love or hate, but when they are at work, when they are moving in society and when they are engaged in the public life of their time. Few novelists have described this, and none has done it better.

I joined the Trollope Society when moving from the deanery of Exeter to the deanery of York because I learned that in York a superbly equipped enthusiast had just founded a branch of the Society. Month by month, with fellow explorers, I read my way through shelves full of Trollopiana. My admiration grew. We enjoyed the funniest of novels and the most agonising. Trollope manages to catch the perennial character not only of church life (the Barchester sequence) and the strife of politics (the Palliser cycle), but told stories of society and scandal (The Eustace Diamonds, The Way we Live Now), and the intrigues of the law (as in Orley Farm: 1862).  There was always more to enjoy.

Some novels are finer than others. His attempts at historical story-telling (La Vendee: 1850, and others), his attempt at science fiction (The Fixed Period: 1882), and the novels in which he describes so unexpectedly life in the Australian outback, the American prairies and the life of Jews in the back streets of Prague are to my mind among his heroic but interesting failures. He wrote so very much, so continually, and with such restless determination to push the boundaries, that he could not always win. The novels describing the foundation of a department store, say, or prophesying  a world where telephones are powered by steam, show him out of even his great depth. The astonishing thing is that he tried such things. He was amazingly ambitious.

A significant number of his works are novels of life in Ireland (from The Macdermots of Ballycloran, his first novel (1847), to The Land Leaguers,  his last, in 1883). I would not have predicted that I should come to prize these so much. Most recently I savoured again the second novel he completed, The Kellys and the O'Kellys: or Landlords and Tenants (1848). He was at that time living happily in Ireland, mapping out the new postal distribution system for the countryside, and his love for the Irish people never left him. He describes Ireland on the verge of the great famine of the 1840s, but the small town personalities, rogues and heroes are portrayed with the humour and respect, interest and tenderness that he was later to bring to describing the housekeepers, grandees and  professional people of England in his most famous works. No wonder Trollope is so venerated in Eire. He did what too few people in England did until too recently: he paid close attention to the people, and took the life of Ireland deeply seriously. 

One of the tests of our love for a writer is whether we can love them in spite of their oddities. Trollope can spin maddening plots, bestow absurd and confusing names on his characters, indulge in some comic scenes of variable quality and fill out over long novels (Victorian editions demanded 3 volume works!) with yet more hunting scenes. But we who love his work are not deterred. There is always so very much where we applaud and enjoy his compassion for humanity, his indignation and amusement at our petty cruelties and his penetrating insight into the motives of people of every quality. We appreciate the world we live in the better for reading or re-reading, at regular intervals, the works of Anthony Trollope.  

Keith Jones