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Trollope
PEOPLE who know anything about Anthony Trollope (18151882) usually know that he got up early every morning and wrote thousands of words, and that by doing this he wrote many books. Some also know that he worked in the Post Office and «invented» the pillar box, or mailbox. Others, claiming a bit more knowledge, gleefully describe how he would finish a novel on one day and invariably begin another the next day; a further refinement has it that if he finished a novel halfway through his predawn writing stint he would immediately start on the next one. Some people explain how his Autobiography, published a year after his death, revealed these mechanical writing habits and destroyed his reputation; some maintain that these revelations ruined his reputation (at least with critics) for good; others argue he was under a cloud until the pioneering work of Trollope biographer and bibliographer Michael Sadleir in the 1920s. Others assert that the real Trollope revival came only during World War II, when nostalgia for the 'tranquil world' of his novels brought solace to war-ravaged Britain; still others believe he has been resurrected only lately, through the TV serialization of the Palliser and Barchester novels, or by the in-progress publication, for the first time, of complete editions of his novels, in paper by Oxford University Press World's Classics, in hard cover by the Trollope Society (through whose lobby a commemorative stone to Trollope was laid in Poets' Corner Westminster Abbey in the spring of 1993). Such myths are good fun. None of them-other than the recent publishing ventures and admission to Poets' Corner-is more than half correct; some are simply wrong. -456-
The easiest to sort out is his Post Office career. After a miserable boyhood and youth (the result chiefly of his father's poverty and his own shy temperament), and after seven years as an unhappy and ineffectual clerk at postal headquarters in London, Trollope got himself transferred to Ireland in 1841. There he quickly found himself, learned to like his work, made a start toward his long-deferred goal of writing novels, married, and gradually rose to the high rank of postal surveyor (roughly one-third from the top). In 1851, still technically only a surveyor's clerk but much valued for his energetic work, he was sent 'on loan' to postal districts in the southwest of England for the purpose of extending the rural posts; at this time, while working in the Channel Islands, he introduced the pillar box. He was actually adapting the practice in use in nearby France. The first boxes were operating by November 1852 at St. Helier; by September 1853 the first box on the mainland was erected, at Carlisle; the first for Ireland were sent to Trollope in March 1855. Within a few years pillar boxes were installed throughout Great Britain, and public approval was almost universal. (Only an extreme conservative, like Trollope's own creation Miss Jemima Stanbury in He Knew He Was Right, could possibly object to the pillar boxes: 'She had not the faintest belief that any letter put into one of them would ever reach its destination. She could not understand why people would not walk to the respectable post-office instead of chucking them into an iron stump, — as she called it, — out in the middle of the street with nobody to look after it.') Although introduction of the roadside pillar boxes was to be Trollope's most memorable innovation in the postal service, he himself was more proud of his work in extending the rural posts throughout much of Ireland and England. In late 1859 he transferred back to an English district. He was occasionally entrusted with special assignments to make postal arrangements and treaties-in Egypt, the West Indies, and the United States. In 1867, after thirtythree years, he retired early from the service, forgoing any pension. His face has never been on a postage stamp.
Trollope's writing habits were complex and various, as were, naturally, his attendant reputations during his lifetime and since. A discussion of these matters can provide helpful insights into a novelist whose work has never quite yielded up its mysteries in the way that, say, that of Dickens or Henry James apparently has. Trollope's peculiar appeal -457- keeps eluding critics, who are far from consensus as to his merits, much less on some single key to his achievement. There is little agreement on which among his many novels represent him at his best.
Trollope wrote forty-seven novels, five volumes of collected short stories plus a handful of uncollected stories, four large travel books (on North America, the West Indies, Australia and New Zealand, and South Africa) and a slight book about Iceland, three biographies, a book on Caesar's Commentaries, four collections of «sketches» (hunting types, clergymen, travelers, tradesmen), an unpublished book of social criticism (The New Zealander), two unsuccessful, never-performed plays, and enough essays and reviews to fill three or four more volumes-some seventy books in all. (For a quick comparison, among Trollope's famous contemporaries Dickens wrote fifteen novels, Thackeray eight, George Eliot seven, Charlotte Brontë four.) What exactly do we know of that well-known energy and those famous or infamous working habits that enabled Trollope to pile up such astounding numbers?
The speed at which he wrote his books and the intervals he allowed between them are for the most part a matter of record. He got off to a late, slow start. He began his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, in 1843 and finished it in 1845; the book was not published until March 1847, when Trollope was just turning thirty-two. Between 1846 and 1847 (exact dates are uncertain until the mid -1850s) he wrote his second novel, The Kellys and the O'Kellys, and between 1848 and 1849 his third, La Vendée. His next novel, The Warden, a one-volume work and much shorter than the first three, which were traditional three-volume novels, was a long time in coming. His work extending the rural posts had kept him more than usually busy. Then, in May 1852, at Salisbury, 'whilst wandering there on a midsummer evening round the purlieus of the cathedral' he conceived the story of The Warden, the first of the Barsetshire novels. But it was a full year later before he began writing the book, only to be interrupted by his recall to Ireland as acting surveyor; he did not finish the novel until October 1854. By early 1855 he had written some eighty-five pages of a sequel, Barchester Towers, but he broke off the novel to write what proved to be an unpublishable work of social criticism, The New Zealander. Having wasted a year and a half on that project, he resumed Barchester Towers in May 1856 and determined to increase his writing efficiency by two strategies. The first was the practice of writing while traveling. By now he moved about not so -458- much on horseback or in horse-drawn coach but by railway: 'Like others,' Trollope recalled, 'I used to read, — though Carlyle has since told me that a man when travelling should not read, but 'sit still and label his thoughts'. But if I intended to make a profitable business out of my writing, and, at the same time, do my best for the Post Office, I must turn these hours to more account than I could do even by reading.' Trollope made up a writing tablet and soon found that he could compose as quickly in a railway carriage as at his desk. Years later he would have carpenters build writing desks in his cabins on ocean-crossing steamers.
The second system he adopted at this time was a working diary of his writing. In his commonplace book of the 1830s he had said that a young man ought to keep a careful account of every monetary transaction and that his own failure to do so had brought him near to 'utter ruin.' Since his move to Ireland in 1841 he had scrupulously recorded his daily travel expenditures for the Post Office, keeping track of every mile, every pound, shilling, and penny. Now past forty years of age, he adapted ledger-style columned record keeping for his writing, marking off the days in weekly sections, entering daily the number of pages written each session, and then noting the week's total. His «page» had approximately 250 words, and he set a goal of forty manuscript pages per week. He would
