An additional source of information about Trollope's writing habits can be discovered in a short autobiographical story, 'The Panjandrum' (1870), which gives an account of how his daydreams fed his fiction. The story, set around 1840, tells of a hopeless scheme, a young man's attempt to found or be part of the founding group of a periodical. Six impoverished people determine to bring out a magazine that will be 'the great future lever of the age.' The narrator, plainly meant to represent Trollope himself, is chosen editor, in spite of his youth. At their meeting the projectors vote not to include novels, even though the editor had volunteered to try one. It later transpires that each of the group is entirely dissatisfied with all the others' contributions, including the editor's short story, and they break up, the plan of founding a magazine abandoned. However fictionalized, the story, as we are assured in An Autobiography, had been suggested by a struggle 'in my own early days… over an abortive periodical which was intended to be the best thing ever done.' The most interesting aspect of The Panjandrum is its detailed illustration of how Trollope's «castle-building» came to materialize on paper. It is not known whether he actually wrote a short story at this time; the account in 'The Panjandrum' may simply reflect his -467- later method. In the story, the young would-be writer, while walking in Regent's Park on a harsh, rainy day, sees a middle-aged servant woman leading a girl of ten or eleven with mud all over her stockings. As he passes them the girl says, 'Oh, Anne, I do so wonder what he's like,' and Anne tells her, 'You'll see.' The narrator begins thinking: who is it that the girl comes 'tripping along through the rain and mud to see, and kiss, and love, and wonder at? And why hadn't she been taken in a cab? Would she be allowed to take off those dirty stockings before she was introduced to her new-found brother, or wrapped in the arms of her stranger father?' The aspiring novelist saw no more of the girl and servant, but 'thought a great deal of the girl.' 'Gradually,' we are told, 'as the unforced imagination came to play upon the matter, a little picture fashioned itself in my mind.' Walking the whole round of Regent's Park, he builds his castle in the air, a story called 'The New Inmate': 'The girl was my own sister, — a sister whom I had never seen till she was thus brought to me for protection and love; but she was older, just budding into womanhood.' He furnishes a little white-curtained sitting room, provides her with books, a piano, a low sofa, and 'all little feminine belongings.' He sells his horse-'the horse of my imagination, the reader will understand, for I had never in truth possessed such an animal'-resigns from his club, and devotes himself to taking care of his sister. But she soon falls in love and is given in marriage to his friend Walker. The narrator, returning home out of the rain, cannot wait to take up his pen. For five days he works on the story. When not writing, while 'walking, eating, or reading,' he still thinks of the story. He dreams of it, weeps over it. The story becomes 'a matter that admitted of no doubt'; the little girl with the muddy stockings is but a 'blessed memory'; his newfound sister is «palpably» real:
All her sweetnesses were present to me, as though I had her there, in the little street turning out of Theobald's Road. To this moment I can distinguish the voice in which she spoke to me that little whispered word, when I asked her whether she cared for Walker. When one thinks of it, the reality of it all is appalling. What need is there of a sister or a friend in the flesh… when by a little exercise of the mind they may be there at your elbow, faultless?
When in An Autobiography Trollope describes himself as 'living with his characters,' as 'weeping with them, laughing with them,' when he says he ever lived much with the ghost of Mrs. Proudie after killing her off in The Last Chronicle, he is not speaking altogether figuratively. The -468- fictional characters of his daydreams came to have an 'appalling reality' for him.
He said of Framley Parsonage, for example, that in writing the book so quickly to order, he had not had much time to think about his characters, and by placing the novel in Barsetshire he was able 'to fall back upon my old friends Mrs. Proudie and the Archdeacon.' Moreover, Barsetshire itself was a 'palpably real' place to him:
As I wrote it I became more closely acquainted than ever with the new shire which I had added to the English counties. I had it all in my mind, — its roads and railroads, its towns and parishes, its members of Parliament, and the different hunts which rode over it. I knew all the great lords and their castles, the squires and their parks, the rectors and their churches. This was the fourth novel of which I had placed the scene in Barsetshire, and as I wrote it I made a map of the dear county. Throughout these stories there has been no name given to a fictitious site which does not represent to me a spot of which I know all the accessories, as though I had lived and wandered there.
But his «personages» were always his first interest. He said of the Palliser novels that his main concern was the gradual growth of his characters with the passage of time. Plantagenet Palliser, Lady Glencora, and the Duke of Omnium, from earlier novels, along with newer characters from the first Phineas Finn novel, Finn himself, Lady Laura, Violet Effingham, and Madame Max Goesler kept «luring» him back: 'So much of my inner life was passed in their company, that I was continually asking myself how this woman would act when this or that event had passed over her head, or how that man would carry himself when his youth had become manhood, or his manhood declined to old age.' Of the «incidents» in the stories he claimed he knew practically nothing beforehand but devised them as he wrote. But by daydreaming, by living with his characters, he knew their personalities so thoroughly that the evil or good within them was as 'clear to me as are the stars on a summer night.'
As it turned out, his characters eventually came also to have, if not an appalling reality, at least an almost spooky presence for his readers. In a rather negative review of Framley Parsonage, the Saturday Review, while complaining that Trollope 'is far less of a novelist than a good diner-out,' had to admit that 'It seems a kind of breach of hospitality to criticise Framley Parsonage at all. It has been an intimate of the drawing room-it has travelled with us in the train-it has lain on the break-469- fast-table. We feel as if we had met Lady Lufton at a country house, admired Lord Dumbello at a ball, and seen Mrs. Proudie at an episcopal evening party.' When Trollope ended the Barsetshire novels with The Last Chronicle, R. H. Hutton, reviewing the book in the Spectator, faced the end of the series with only partially mock despair. 'What am I to do without ever meeting Archdeacon Grantly?' Hutton quotes a friend as saying, 'He was one of my best and most intimate friends… It was bad enough to lose the Old Warden, Mr. Septimus Harding, but that was a natural death… Mr. Trollope has no right to break old ties in this cruel and reckless way.' Hutton professed 'loneliness very oppressive' at the prospect of never again meeting Grantly, 'the best known and most typical of his fellow-countrymen,' and was indulging thoughts of leaving England for ever. The London Review expressed 'gentle melancholy' at the leave-taking from Barsetshire, and, paraphrasing Trollope's words, said: 'To us, as well as to him, Barset has long been a real county, and its city a real city; and the spires and towers have been before our eyes, and the voices of the people are known to our ears, and the pavements of the city ways are familiar to our footsteps.' Mrs. Oliphant wrote in Blackwood's Magazine, 'We did not ask that this chronicle should be the last. We were in no hurry to be done with our old friends. And there are certain things which he has done without consulting us against which we greatly demur. To kill Mrs. Proudie was murder, or manslaughter at the least.'
When in 1874 Phineas Redux, the fourth of the six Palliser novels, brought that series once again before the reading public, one reviewer, having first noted that a rumor of Phineas's return had long been current, said: 'Indeed, we all of us know those of Mr. Trollope's characters who appear and reappear in the main line of his social tradition, so much better than we know ninety-nine hundredths of our own friends, that if by any chance we can gather news of their future fortunes, however indirectly, from the one depository of the secret of their existence, there is none of us who would not avail himself of that opportunity far more eagerly than of any of the ordinary sources of social gossip.' To his readers, Trollope's creations seemed almost more real than did their actual life counterparts; they were becoming nearly as real to some readers as they were to Trollope. Virginia Woolf was to say that we believe in Trollope's characters 'as we do in the reality of our weekly bills,' that we get from his novels 'the same sort of refreshment and delight that we get from seeing something actually happen in the street below.'
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Trollope's critical reputation has long been a source of misinformation. Michael Sadleir's assertion in 1927 that Trollope's first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran was «stillborn» in 1847 and represented a 'false dawn' runs contrary to fact. The book received at least thirteen reviews in England, almost all of them very positive. It is true that Trollope's first three novels did not sell, that only with The Warden and Barchester Towers, in 1855 and 1857, did he become popular. 'The novel-reading world,' he said, 'did not go mad about The Warden; but I soon felt that it had not failed as the others had failed… And I could discover that people around me knew that I had written a book.' The reviewers liked especially the novel's 'great cleverness.' The Leader innocently said that The Warden
