They always said that Frank must marry money and he has done so, proving them right and their hateful, mercenary and callous attitude viable. We are tempted to ask why Trollope did not allow Sir Roger’s will to be declared invalid, the estate to be lost and Frank and Mary to live the much vaunted quiet life as Barsetshire (or Australian) farmers.

The answer, does not lie only in his personal wish to make his novel a comedy, fulfil his brother’s plot outline and please his public. He was a deep-thinking, self-questioning man, and if the darker outlook he was to develop was still in the future, shadows of it cast themselves on the years before. There is no doubt of his profound inner condemnation of such as the de Courcys and, along with it, his inescapable observation that their mores did prevail in the society he saw around him. Their ways were the ways of the world, and it was realism and approximation to contemporary life that he sought.

His exhaustive analysis of the brutish effects an excess of wealth can have on men and women was yet to come. The Way We Live Now was not to be written for another seventeen years. But Lady Arabella’s fawning adulation of Mary once she has been assured that Sir Roger’s fortune is to be hers (’My daughter! my child! my Frank’s own bride!’), an odious and chilling display, rivals any scene in that novel, the masterpiece of his later years.

Just as a recollection of George Eliot brings to mind that deep, prc-Frcudian intense examination of human motive, and thinking of Thomas Hardy recalls glorious evocations of a lost rural beauty, so with Trollope it is ‘scenes’ we remember; such set-pieces as Mrs Proudie’s first encounter with the Archdeacon, the breaking of the news to Lily Dale that her lover has jilted her, Johnny Eamcs, the Earl and the bull, and, in Doctor Thorne, Frank with his aunt, Augusta with Lady Amelia and the magnificent Scatcherd deathbed. Though he knew it so well, Trollope had no interest in descriptions of the countryside, unless it was to be bought, sold or hunted over. He scarcely ever describes what his people wear or has much to say about the interiors of their homes. Like some other writers of prose fiction, he was unsuccessful when he tried to write for the stage. Yet his ear for dialogue was so fine that we know, by some kind of natural perception, that this is precisely the way our Victorian forebears spoke, not a word too many or too few, not a wrong emphasis or grating phrase.

No great gift of visual imagination is needed to ‘see’ his people as they encounter each other in their drawing rooms and stable-yards, country lanes or cathedral closes. Trollope brings them before us, less by description than through their own intensely individual utterance. Across a hundred and thirty years they live for us still, vibrant with life, charged with their creator’s own formidable energy. This is one of the reasons why he is not only read so constantly and is so many readers’ favourite author but is re-read, along with Jane Austen and Dickens, perhaps more than any other. He was almost the only Victorian to bring to modern readers people with whom they can effortlessly identify today.

NOTES

1 From Trollope: A Commentary by Michael Sadleir, 1927.

2 From Partial Portraits by Henry James, first published in the New York Century Magazine, 1883.

3 From Anthony Trollope by A. O.J. Cockshut, 1955.

4 Ibid.

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Chronology

1815 Battle of Waterloo

Lord George Gordon Byron, Hebrew Melodies

Anthony Trollope born 24 April at 16 Keppel Street, Blooms-bury, the fourth son of Thomas and Frances Trollope. Family moves shortly after to Harrow-on-the-Hill

1823 Attends Harrow as a day-boy (–1825)

1825 First public steam railway opened

Sir Walter Scott, The Betrothed aaà The Talisman

Sent as a boarder to a private school in Sunbury, Middlesex

1827 Greek War of Independence won in the battle of Navarino

Sent to school at Winchester College. His mother sets sail for the USA on 4 November with three of her children

1830 George IV dies; his brother ascends the throne as William IV

William Cobbett, Rural Rides

Removed from Winchester. Sent again to Harrow until 1834

1832 Controversial First Reform Act extends the right to vote to approximately one man in five

Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans

1834 Slavery abolished in the British Empire. Poor Law Act intro duces workhouses to England

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii

Trollope family migrates to Bruges to escape creditors. Anthony returns to London to take up a junior clerkship in the General Post Office

1835 Halley’s Comet appears. ‘Railway mania’ in Britain

Robert Browning, Paracelsus

His famer dies in Bruges

1840 Queen Victoria marries Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Penny Post introduced

Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (–1841)

Dangerously ill in May and June

1841 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

Appointed Postal Surveyor’s Clerk for Central District Of Ireland. Moves to Banagher, King’s County (now Co. Offaly)

1843 John Ruskin, Modem Painters (vol. I)

Begins to write his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran

1844 Daniel O’Connell, campaigner for Catholic Emancipation, imprisoned for conspiracy; later released

William Thackeray, The Luck of Barry Lyndon

Marries Rose Heseltine in June. Transferred to Clonmel, Co. Tipperary

1846 Famine rages in Ireland. Repeal of the Corn Laws

Dickens, Dombey and Son (–1848)

First son, Henry Merivale, born in March

1847 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights A second son, Frederic James Andiony, born in September The Macdermots of Ballycloran

1848 Revolution in France; re-establishment of the Republic.