shilling-part serialization; he would prefer to pay three thousand pounds for the right to print any kind of part issue and a first book edition. Trollope agreed. Smith next said that he might like to run the story in thirty instead of the usual twenty numbers. Trollope responded with a letter that modestly revealed his virtuosity in treating the problem of lengths in serial fiction. If the story must be written for possible twenty- or thirty-installment publication, preparation must be made to accommodate the larger number of parts:
It would not be practicable to divide 20 numbers into 30 equal parts, unless the work be specially done with this intent. I commonly divide a number of 32 pages (such as the numbers of 'Orley Farm') into 4 chapters each. If you wish the work to be so arranged as to run either to 20 or to 30 numbers, I must work each of the 20 numbers by 6 chapters, taking care that the chapters run so -463- equally, two and two, as to make each four into one equal part or each 6 into one equal part. There will be some trouble in this, but having a mechanical mind I think I can do it… You will understand that I wish to suit your views altogether; but that it is necessary that you should say-Write it in 20 parts or in 30 parts-or in parts to suit either number. And you will also understand that if your mind be made up either to 30 or to 20, you need not put my mechanical genius to work.
(Smith decided on twenty monthly parts; then, two days later, he changed his mind and was leaning toward weekly publication in thirtytwo parts, this last being the form he eventually settled upon.)
Like all writers for serial publication Trollope believed that the installments of a serial novel were meant to encase sections of the story that would hang together and, as he explained, «entice» the reader to come back to the next number. A serial should have 'at least an attempt at murder in every number,' Trollope once told a publisher, though he himself could 'never get beyond giving my people a fever or a broken leg.' Moreover, serial publication, he said, 'forces upon the author the conviction that he should not allow himself to be tedious in any single part.' Trollope admitted his own work was «often» tedious, but insisted that the serial writer must feel that he 'cannot afford to have too many pages skipped out of the few which are to meet the reader's eye at the same time. Who can imagine the first half of the first volume of Waverley coming out in shilling numbers?' These ideas, he explained, came to him while writing Framley Parsonage, which novel, in spite of its failings, had, he thought, at least 'no long succession of dull pages.' It can be argued that Framley Parsonage did more than give his popularity a tremendous boost and turn him permanently into a serial novelist; it would in the long run make him more careful in the balancing of plots and counterplots, and to this extent serial publication made him a better and slightly different novelist. During the serialization of this novel, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote to George Smith, 'I wish Mr. Trollope would go on writing Framley Parsonage for ever.' In some ways, he did just that.
An account of the apportioning of Trollope's writing into serialized segments, of early rising, of working diaries, and of writing while traveling on trains and ocean steamers leaves out what he would have described as the hardest and most important part of writing a novel-464- his thinking about his characters, 'living with' them, daydreaming about them. This practice went way back, having its origins in his unhappy school days at Winchester College where Trollope attended from his twelfth to fifteenth year. There he developed the habit of escaping from the discomforts, failures, and loneliness of his boarding school existence into an imaginary world. Even in earlier days, as a child, he had been often thrown upon himself. Other boys had not much played with him, and he had had to 'form my plays within myself.' Now, the practice became continuous, almost systematic:
Study was not my bent, and I could not please myself by being all idle. Thus it came to pass that I was always going about with some castle in the air firmly built within my mind. Nor were these efforts in architecture spasmodic, or subject to constant change from day to day. For weeks, for months, if I remember rightly, from year to year, I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions, and proprieties, and unities. Nothing impossible was ever introduced, — nor even anything which, from outward circumstances, would seem to be violently improbable. I myself was of course my own hero. Such is a necessity of castle-building. But I never became a king, or a duke, — much less when my height and personal appearance were fixed could I be an Antinous, or six feet high. I never was a learned man, nor even a philosopher. But I was a very clever person, and beautiful young women used to be fond of me. And I strove to be kind of heart, and open of hand, and noble in thought, despising mean things; and altogether I was a very much better fellow that I have ever succeeded in being since.
One can see here the seeds of his disposition as a novelist taking root. Certainly that was the way Trollope later interpreted his early habit of incessant 'castle-building.' When, at nineteen, he became a clerk in the London General Post Office, he kept up the practice. He had determined to become a writer and secretly confided this aspiration to his journal. In those pages he convinced himself that he had not the talent for poetry or drama, nor the erudition for history or biography: 'But I thought it possible that I might write a novel.'
Years went by, and he never made the attempt, all the while suffering his own private mental disgrace for not making the attempt. Still, Trollope continued the daydreaming that had begun at Winchester, carrying on a story in his mind for months and longer. It was an admittedly 'dangerous mental practice,' but one that taught him how 'to maintain an interest in a fictitious story, to dwell on a work created by my own imagination, and to live in a world altogether outside the world -465- of my material life.' He later insisted that had it not been for this daydreaming he would never have written a novel. It is worth noting of his subsequent writing career that when it came to the actual putting of pen to paper, the words seemed to come forth as though being dictated to a secretary. If a writer of fiction, Trollope said, has done his preparation, his thinking about his characters, he could work straight through for three hours, there being no need to 'sit nibbling his pen, and gazing at the wall.' A friend staying at a country house where Trollope was also a visitor related how Trollope came down to breakfast and said he had just 'told himself' so many pages. And his manuscript pages were sent off to the printer as written-no second drafts, no fair copies, and usually no more than two or three words changed or crossed through on any page.
Late in life Trollope wrote a magazine article, 'A Walk in a Wood,' in which he dilated on how for him the most difficult part of creating a novel was not the actual writing, but the 'thinking.' By this, he explained, he did not mean thinking about the 'entire plot' or overall story, since the larger incidents of his tales 'are fabricated to fit my story as it goes on, and not my story to fit the incidents.' (He mentions Lady Mason's confessing her forgery in Orley Farm, Lizzie Eustace's stealing her own diamonds in The Eustace Diamonds, and Mrs. Proudie's dying of a heart attack in The Last Chronicle as examples of large plot developments that had suddenly come upon him the midst of writing.) Rather, the hard work of thinking was expended on the 'minute ramifications of tale-telling;-how this young lady should be made to behave herself toward that young gentleman;-how this mother or that father would be affected by the ill conduct or the good of a son or a daughter.' Such thinking is best served by a peaceful atmosphere:
Bad noises, bad air, bad smells, bad light, an inconvenient attitude, ugly surroundings, little misfortunes that have lately been endured, little misfortunes that are soon to come, hunger and thirst, overeating and overdrinking, want of sleep or too much of it, a tight boot, a starched collar, are all inimical to thinking… It is not the sorrows but the annoyances of life which impede. Were I told that the bank had broken in which my little all was kept for me I could sit down and write my love story… but to discover that I had given half a sovereign instead of sixpence to a cabman would render a great effort necessary before I could find the fitting words for a lover. These little lacerations of the spirit, not the deep wounds, make the difficulty. Of all the nuisances named, noises are the worst… To think with a barrel organ within hearing is hero-466- ic. For myself, I own that a brass band altogether incapacitates me. No sooner does the first note of the opening burst reach my ear, than I start up, fling down my pen, and cast my thoughts disregarded into the abyss of some chaos that is always there ready to receive them.
Although he could do some thinking in a carriage and had even composed some 'little plots' on horseback waiting at the covert side during a fox hunt, he much preferred to think about his characters while walking in a wood. It is best, he writes, to reject even the company of a dog, and to keep away from cottages, children, and other chance wanderers, 'so much easier is it to speak than to think.' Solitary woods were becoming rarer in England, but the 'pure forests' of Switzerland and the Black Forest-late in life his favorite holiday places-were the perfect 'hunting grounds' for thought.
The above article was written a decade after he retired from the Post Office, and one can see how in later years he was more productive in his novel writing while on holiday, but one wonders how he found time for his daydreaming during the many hectic years when he worked full time for the post office-which job, it should be said, he always regarded as his primary occupation.
