BROADLY speaking, there are two great streams to English literary tradition: realism and romance. If we had to categorise 19th-century novelists along these lines, we would put Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot into the realist camp. Dickens, the Brontës, and Stevenson, on the other hand, were drawn to the Romantic, the Gothic, the sensational, and the grotesque. No prizes for guessing where Anthony Trollope belongs. If anybody held a non-distorting mirror up to the Victorian age, it was he of the bushy beard and the little spectacles.
Anthony had an unhappy childhood, shuttling between major English public schools that he hated, let down by a weak father and a strong mother (who was forced to keep writing in order to pay the bills), and self-conscious about his awkward frame. In early manhood, however, Ireland made him, as he grappled successfully with the logistics of the postal service, met his lovable wife, rode gleefully to hounds, and started to write fiction. On returning to London, the rising civil servant who introduced the pillar box had enough surplus energy to write before breakfast or on railway trains, and to get away to the hunting field for relaxation.
As a novelist, he had his breakthrough to world fame when he applied his understanding of networks, postal and otherwise, to those of the Church of England and Parliament. Readers of this paper who have yet to explore the Chronicles of Barset have a treat in store. Trollope understands the ways in which the private and public lives of Anglican clergy overlap, for good or ill. A Liberal in politics (he failed to become an MP), he was also liberal in his treatment of human frailty. He needed to be when writing the Palliser novels, in which political machinations and the demands of the marriage market converge. Only in one of his longest and most challenging novels, The Way We Live Now, does he really let rip as a social satirist with a Thackerayan edge.
Although you will find short stories in the huge Trollopian oeuvre, he mainly wrote long novels. Dinah Birch’s challenge was to write a very short introduction to this prolific author, whose work she has edited. An Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, she succeeds impressively, offering chapters on Trollope’s family and work, story and style, Ireland, and the two major series of novels, before rounding off on money, inheritance, and the law, women and men, travel, and Trollope’s afterlife.
She argues that he is, above all, enjoyable. She believes that the questions that he addresses continue to matter: “How is power to be properly exercised? What is the right relation between men and women? Why do so many people seem intent on destroying their own happiness? How is the need for progressive reform to be balanced with the claims of tradition?” Trollope, she concludes, “offers no simple answers, but his fusion of entertainment with the power to make his readers think has not diminished”.
Those who have yet to enjoy Trollope should start here. Those who have read him before will soon want to read him again.
Dr Michael Wheeler is a Visiting Professor of English at the University of Southampton. His latest book is William Ewart Gladstone: The heart and soul of a statesman (OUP) (Books, 11 April).
Anthony Trollope: A very short introduction
Dinah Birch
OUP £8.99
(978-0-19-284562-7)
Church Times Bookshop £8.09