Why I Read Anthony Trollope

I did my spade work in reading the novels of the Victorians, a period in Britain from 1820 to 1914, as an English Literature major at university in the early 1980s. Of the admired Victorian-Briton novelists then in circulation we read Charlotte and Emily Bront?, George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and William Morris. Anthony Trollope was not on the syllabus. Since there’s no way when reading a syllabus to enforce the behaviors of the persons who wrote it, guesswork is worthless. Prohibitions about Trollope, if there were any, had to be accepted.

Luckily by the mid-1980s Anthony Trollope’s reputation rose. These days I enjoy many novels by him, including several in his most well-regarded series, the Chronicles of Barsetshire, comprised of six volumes. It is in one of his standalone works, The Claverings, that I see a most unsentimental comment the author made about setting his words in stone: he evidently prized its scenes for their “genuine fun”.1 Conversely one must assume he got through the serials in a way not fun—writing as a means to an end, a job. Many have quibbled with Trollope’s plain approach to writing, but he obviously took a workman’s pride in his craft, associating it with his time for purposes of money and trade. For the seriousness with which he carried on his trade, with a stress on the value of manual labor, the poet W.H. Auden called him “sympathetic”.2

The novelist’s contemporaries weren’t as charitable. Take the American novelist and literary lion Henry James, one in a set of brilliant brothers (William James was the influential theologian who authored Principles of Psychology). Making his way up the career ladder to literary stardom, Henry James had had “some talk” with Anthony Trollope, his elder by 28 years, on an ocean liner heading to Liverpool; it is recorded that he tagged him “the dullest Briton” with “a gross and repulsive face and manner”—‘gross’ I assume refers to how, in the short splice of time they’d talked, James noted nothing significant.3 I wonder if the venue mattered to James more than it did to Trollope, Trollope already involved, James just starting out, uninvolved. Regardless, Trollope’s talent at selection, his conditional (relevant) insight into people’s traits and cyclical-oriented natures, and his drive to produce unfaltering diction are salient in his work.

Anthony Trollope was the fourth child of the British travel writer and novelist Frances (“Fanny”) Trollope, a homemaker abroad whose audaciousness puts her in a category all her own. Novelist Julian Barnes casts doubt on writing dynasties, of talent handed down in families, and he goes so far as to call Fanny and Anthony Trollope a “self-evident abnormality”.? Yet the cartoon power of duos isn’t invisible. The commercialization behind getting a foot in the door is, I think, more un-researchable than it is abnormal. Critically speaking, the human behavior of locating predicaments (or your tongue) in the environment whilst not doing anything to stop either one is a perverse game of “You Can’t Trust Your Neighbor,” a circumstance one must give up in order to put it under consideration. The free talent of the mind to make someone or something stand out is not consistently demonstrated by all who write for a living, and it does seem that a talent to unfold what is hidden is what transpired in the championing of both Frances and Anthony Trollope, however it happened and among whomever it did.

Consider Trollope’s second volume in the Chronicles of Barsetshire, Barchester Towers.? “Barchester” is a freshly coined compound word, not a copula (to be a copula, its parts would have to acquire a word in between, such as “becoming”). From an aural standpoint, here’s “Bart” (a drawn-out sound that ends on a “silent ‘t’), next is “Chester” (two syllables joined by yoking a fricative and a hard ‘t’), then “Ah” (it ends solidly—but only briefly—on a contented sound). The word choice is spot on. He who is “the Bart” is a baronet, a rank between baron and knight. Baronets come into play just below the peerage—below what is, in Britain, its legal upper class. “Chester” is a place name, and can denote a town of ancient military origin. Pair Barchester with “Towers”, and someone familiar with British history is not wrong to conceive a drama in which non-aristocrats are eying their cities’ tower structures suspiciously, arming up in secret, afraid of duplicitous use. But Victorian England was bent on adapting, having lost much in recent European conflicts, a circumstance that reveals on the horizon the towers of a cathedral city.

In the novel’s opening Trollope serves up a narrator. “In the latter days of July in the year 185–”, the narration begins, leaving the date open (1). If I could draw this opening and what it means on a chalkboard, I’d represent in outline the basic shape of an upturned triangle. Next, I’d draw a stroke across the middle, as in the letter ‘A.’ From any point along this level stroke, you see out. Above you to a point, all is secure. Logically, war could crush you from the top down.

So here is England, solid, bound up in an old ecclesiastical framework that isn’t knitting in well with the time allotted for it amidst present-day cares: “a most important question was for ten days hourly asked…and answered every hour in various ways—Who was to be the new bishop?” (1). In other words, the people are behaving as if they feel vulnerable (my edition contains helpful definitions of the “stones” in the church’s hierarchical system (xxxii–xxxiii)).

According to Suzanne Fagence Cooper and Paul Atterbury, in the period Barchester Towers was written and released, “all students at the [Established] Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were [still] tested on their allegiance to the Church of England”.? As I read, I envision Anthony Trollope on his knees patiently tiling in the mundane facts and too-vague feelings associated as occurring with “reconstruction” after a top man in the hierarchy has gone down. No one is really embattled, here; the characters are absorbed in a backlog of cares as, one by one, new persons in the system gradually require them to update old norms. Financial motivation dominates.

Like Jonathan Swift in the Stuart period, Trollope had reason to observe that—unlike those in power—a critical mass is always careless about who the figurehead of takeover is. A liberal theme is evident throughout Trollope’s oeuvre, conservatism finding and following its own way. The characters, in their turn, get caked in conflict within a cloddy system that should work for them and clearly doesn’t. In three parts (or “volumes” as they called them in those days), Barchester Towers paces out the story of a local community under duress, its hatreds dispersed and reformed, then revised again, in a short space of time and surrounding a high number of vacant paid-positions. The novel boils down to a comedy about the manipulation of policy inside the Established church, and the business entailed in seeing desire through to contentment.

The novel’s chief female protagonist is the recently widowed mother, Eleanor Bold. In the crowd of costumes that fills the dusty bottom drawer of fiction’s wardrobe, the widow motif turns up frequently. Aside from the traits that throw Eleanor into the “Widow” category, she’s evidently not colorful. She has, says the narrator, “none of that dazzling brilliancy, of that voluptuous Rubens beauty, of that pearly whiteness, and those vermillion tints… which immediately entranced with the power of a basilisk men…” (129). Juxtaposed with this characterization we find her cooing over her baby boy, spreading her hair over his face like the wings of a chirpy raptor, forming over his crib a low-ceilinged ambulatory analogous to the “walking space” at the remote east end of a cathedral, her fecundity having left her for the present. Her widowhood has turned her “prosperous” (15). Added to her bountiful inheritance is her self-important yet well-intentioned family, her father and sister respectively—a church warden and an archdeacon’s wife. Her father declines to come and live with Eleanor and the boy, since he “could not be prevailed upon to forego the possession of some small home of his own” (15). Obviously, an old man not wanting to live in a baby-proofed house is understandable: the point is, he’s not been forced into his solo lifestyle.

But Eleanor Bold is “doomed to be the intended victim of more schemes than one” (122). Three suiters are either proposed or are plotting to take her hand. The weakest is Bertie Stanhope, the son of a stipend-and-benefits-rich churchman who has been the heir to a previous bishop’s leniency (“He had resided in Italy for twelve years. His first going there had been attributed to a sore throat” (61). Bertie doesn’t really care all that much who he marries, but as he’s a portrait artist and they can’t afford his outlay, his sisters force him to entrap Eleanor, believing he isn’t fool enough to marry for love—one calls Eleanor “that vapid swarthy creature in the widow’s cap, who looked as though her clothes had been stuck on her back with a pitchfork” (126). Eleanor’s second suitor, Mr. Slope, is the new bishop’s chaplain and a reformer. Mr. Slope clearly sees that the Established church is in trauma. Not only does he believe he can fix it, he plays Eleanor as if he urgently needs her acceptance. She isn’t flattered, so he becomes willful and uses their moments together to inflate his social standing, aware that he can never get Eleanor Bold’s popular father into his social pocket without curling up at her hearth, first. For this reason Mr. Slope makes “inquiries as to the widow’s income,” statistics which—he wants to believe—induce him to “speculate” on her (130). Her third suitor, Francis Arabin, does love Eleanor, but she (mostly) misunderstands him and finds his high-minded principles tiresome.

Poking away at romance, Trollope’s talent at satire comes into play. Insanely, Eleanor does not resist Mr. Slope’s wish to come regularly into “her fold”: “she could not but acknowledge that Mr. Slope was exceedingly kind” (138). She even comes to receive a confidential letter from him and defends him to her family, having “conceived that they were all prejudiced and illiberal in their persecution of him”, even though she admittedly dislikes him (261–263). As Slope moves further and further into the established circles of Barchester, he nearly wrecks her, fiscally. Presumably she is irritable and somewhat slow-of-thought after her trauma, and can’t see the point of having to reject Mr. Slope as her lover to her well-positioned family, since he isn’t her lover. Luckily for her, they have taken their rights seriously and have begun to talk—not even in code—about what they call “Mrs. Bold’s improprieties” (450).

In the end it is Eleanor’s step, deliberate and delicate, that imbues the novel with the romance of having a tilted perspective. Her own state of affairs is reliant on how she thinks and feels. Trollope plays for us his short-lived “golden window of opportunity,” a theme on the question, “How Bad Can a Good Girl Be?”, overrunning it with scores, turning it in and out of danger and other variations. The well of drama runs deep. Of course a reader’s stance can always “become” indifferent: “What more can be said about relationships?” But classic romances recur and will repeat again, with an original signature every time.

No question, Anthony Trollope is by now considered a superior Victorian novelist. His texts are funny and serious, plus Trollope seems to carry forward his mother’s small and snarky, got-it-did-that-already feeling of attainment, as do many children of mothers who can’t always find two nickels to rub together. His plots show not the trait of adhering to the popular spread of factionalism (witness his tactic of setting down the unsharpened, No. 2-leaded “Eleanor Bold” amidst the carryings on of a bunch of engineering pencils). Detachment during any time—so that you can hear someone else think—is a rare virtue. Learn it how you will, pass it down if you can, the subversive’s ability to ride over settings quickly, chewing over what audiences read, presenting it then as if under a lens, is an advantage.

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Reposting by Martha Witte on LinkedIn of original content, with editorial refinements. (8/2/24).

1Anthony Trollope, The Claverings: v. 22, Penguin Trollope, author’s biography (1993).

2W.H. Auden, A Poet of the Actual, in Forewords and Afterwords, 265 (1973).

3Henry James quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, 177 (1985).

?Interview with Julian Barnes by Shusha Guppy, Julian Barnes, The Art of Fiction No. 165, The Paris Review (2000), https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/562/the-art-of-fiction-no-165-julian-barnes (last visited Aug. 2, 2024).

?Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1983). Page references appear parenthetically in the text.

?Suzanne Fagence Cooper and Paul Atterbury, Religion and Doubt in The Victorian Vision: Inventing New Britain, ed. John M. MacKenzie, 125–126 (2001).