have preferred to work seven days a week, but of course there were weeks when he could only manage a few days, and some weeks when illness or pressures of other work kept him from writing at all. He usually did the forty pages per week, though on a few occasions he pushed himself to more than a hundred pages in a week. The working diaries were an exercise in self-discipline. For whereas his postal work had its daily and weekly obligations-including frequent and lengthy written reports-his novel writing was under no compulsion, no deadline other than his own will, and the result had been what Trollope termed «spasmodic» efforts only. But henceforth he wrote under the pressure of these diaries, with the result that 'if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour, so that the deficiency might be supplied.' A week without a sufficient number of pages was 'a blister to my eye,' Trollope wrote, and a month would have been 'a sorrow to my heart.' Lapses were indicated by entries such as 'Sore throat,' 'Ill,' Hunting,' or 'Alas.' But such interruptions were to remain relatively few; by and large the working -459- diaries recorded a steady outpouring of words that provided a deep source of satisfaction. The diary-regulated writing would lead to startling results: with Barchester Towers, which was written at a pace five times faster than that which generated The Warden, Trollope's celebrated productivity took hold, and for good.
Throughout the remaining years of the 1850s he produced The Three Clerks, Doctor Thorne, The Bertrams, a travel book on the West Indies, and a handful of short stories. The critics were already objecting to his writing so much; and Trollope was considering publishing a short novel about trade (The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson) anonymously. Publisher Edward Chapman, soon after accepting The Bertrams, declined the short novel: 'I should not like to do it without your name & at the same time I feel convinced that it is better that your name should be withheld, for there is a strong impression abroad that you are writing too rapidly for your permanent fame.' Chapman had doubtless just read Sir Henry Maine's article in the Saturday Review, which said that although Doctor Thorne, the latest proof of Trollope's 'fecundity,' was good news, it nonetheless caused uneasiness about the 'rapid multiplication of his progeny.' A few months later, the National Review, in an otherwise favorable overview of the four novels that began with The Warden, complained that the production of two three- volume novels within ten months did not allow an author time to 'to give due polish and completion' to his work, and regretted that Trollope 'should be guilty of the bad taste of counting quantity before quality.' Of his next novel the Spectator said, 'The fact is he writes too fast. An average six or eight months is too short a time for the gestation and production of a first-class novel.' Trollope, though he paid close attention to reviews, dismissed these warnings. Writing years later in his Autobiography about beginning The Bertrams the day after finishing Doctor Thorne, he said, with some irony, that he had determined 'to excel, if not in quality, at any rate in quantity.' He considered himself a workman-he grew increasingly fond of comparing the writing of novels with the making of shoes-and was proud of never having «scamped» his work. 'My novels,' he continued, 'whether good or bad, have been as good as I could make them. Had I taken three months of idleness between each they would have been no better.' (In fact, as shall be seen, he frequently did allow months between novels.) But he did pay heed to the criticism of overproduction to the extent that he kept alive in the back of his mind the plan for anonymous publication (and in 1867 and 1868 he -460- brought out two novels anonymously, Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel). He estimated that a sensible pace for him would be three novels every two years. Four times in An Autobiography he referred with undisguised amusement to an incident in 1857 when he was 'scared from the august columns of Paternoster Row,' that is, from the publishing house of Longmans, when one of the firm protested to him about some fertile writer (probably G. P. R. James) who had 'spawned upon them (the publishers) three novels a year.' Trollope's own output, he decided, would be confined to 'half the fecundity of that terrible author of whom the publisher in Paternoster Row complained to me.' As it turned out, he sometimes bettered this pace.
Trollope did not hit his full writing stride until he was transferred to the English postal district at the close of 1859. At this time he was commissioned to write the long, lead novel for the about-to-belaunched Cornhill Magazine, edited by Thackeray and published by George Smith. Both the novel, Framley Parsonage, and the magazine itself became huge hits, and Trollope, whose popularity had been steadily increasing since The Warden in 1855, was well on his way to becoming, as one reviewer said in 1862, 'almost a national institution.' It was in connection with the return to England and the writing of Framley Parsonage that Trollope explained, in An Autobiography, the practice of steady early rising: he had taken a house at Waltham Cross, twelve miles north of London, and he brought with him from Ireland his Irish groom, Barney, who had worked in his employ since the early 1840s. Now Barney was entrusted with the duty of calling Trollope at five o'clock every morning so that he could be at his desk by five-thirty. For this service, which included bringing a cup of coffee, Barney was paid an additional five pounds yearly. Trollope wrote that during all the Waltham Cross years, Barney was never late: 'I do not know that I ought not to feel that I owe more to him than to any one else for the success I have had.' He would spend the first half hour in reading the previous day's work, and then, with watch before him, he strove to write a page every fifteen minutes, or some ten pages-twenty-five hundred words-daily. A pace of ten pages per day would have produced in ten months three three-volume novels, the very number that had so exasperated the publisher in Paternoster Row. Beginning with Framley Parsonage, Trollope often averaged about six «volumes» a year-and by a volume he meant the roughly sixty to eighty thousand words that made up one of the volumes of the standard nineteenth-century three-volume -461- novel. (Of his forty-seven novels, twenty-one were three-deckers, nine were longer, the equivalent of four or five volumes, like Phineas Finn and The Way We Live Now, and seventeen were shorter, in one or two volumes, like Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite and Cousin Henry.) His daily output over the years averaged under ten pages per sitting; and it was nowhere near constant, varying between lows of four pages and highs of sixteen. (The fastest burst of his writing career came in July 1864 when for fourteen days straight he composed fifteen pages daily of the two-volume Miss Mackenzie-he usually managed more pages per diem when writing short novels.) Only on extraordinary occasions did he write a novel nearly straight through without a break. Naturally, a short novel, and one written during a holiday, had a better chance for this distinction: Lady Anna, written entirely aboard ship en route to Australia in 1871, had but one day of interruption, for illness; Dr. Wortle's School, written while on holiday at a friend's rectory in 1879, had none at all. What kept the production below three long novels per year-in addition to interruptions from illness, hunting, extra postal work, unusually difficult travel, and the writing of magazine articles-was the time Trollope usually allowed between novels. These pauses were chiefly rest periods, though doubtless he occupied himself during apparently fallow stretches with occasional writing (not recorded in the diaries), proofreading, and much preparatory thinking about his fictional characters. The early novels, as we have seen, were separated by considerable gaps, even years. After Barchester Towers, the intervals varied crazily, ranging from more than three months down to three instances when Trollope completed a novel and began a new one the next day (never did he begin a new novel the very day he finished one). A rough average, for what it is worth, was about six weeks between books.
After retiring from the Post Office in 1867, when one might have expected his writing productivity to increase, he wrote somewhat less than while engaged in two professions. He maintained that three hours a day of writing-four on the right kind of holiday-was about all that one could do anyway, so retirement had little effect on his output. During the eight years prior to leaving the service he wrote fifteen novels (in forty-two 'volumes'), one travel book, three collections of short stories, and enough journalism to fill a large-sized volume. During the following eight years he wrote thirteen novels (in forty 'volumes'), one travel book, one collection of short stories, and less journalism. Thus -462- the latter pace was slightly slower than that of the period before his retirement; and that of the last eight years of his life was in turn slightly slower than that preceding it.
Another important and in some sense more significant turn in Trollope's writing habits also stemmed from Framley Parsonage: this watershed novel turned him into a serial novelist. Of the thirty-seven novels published after Framley Parsonage only four were originally released in book form, and of these, two had been intended for serial publication that had gone awry, and another, published posthumously, would have been placed with a magazine had Trollope lived. Thus Miss Mackenzie (1865) was the only novel he wrote after Framley Parsonage that was not intended for serial publication. These serialized stories were written with an eye to division into installments; they appeared in many different configurations, sometimes improvised by the publisher, but generally under Trollope's control: monthly, in magazines or independent «parts» in six, eight, twelve, sixteen, or twenty installments; weekly, in magazines or «parts» in twelve, twenty-six, thirty-two, forty, or more installments.
There is no doubting Trollope's talent for proportioning his work to order. His 'mechanical genius,' as he laughingly called it, enabled him to write his novels to exactly prescribed limits-installments per novel, chapters per installment, pages per chapter, words per page. The most explicit account of this kind of accommodation is seen in his negotiations with George Smith for the publication of The Last Chronicle of Barset. In early January 1866 he wrote to Smith, proposing a long novel in twenty shilling parts; Smith answered that he was not sure about
