'certainly promises well for the author's future, if he gives us more books.' Two years later when Barchester Towers appeared, it met with almost unanimous praise from the critics, and again the label «clever» appeared everywhere. While the reviews were superb, Trollope himself could afford years later in An Autobiography to be more modest, saying only that Barchester Towers, like The Warden, 'achieved no great reputation, but it was one of the novels which novel readers were called upon to read.' It became, he went on, 'one of those novels which do not die quite at once, which live and are read for perhaps a quarter of a century.' In fact, Barchester Towers has come down to posterity as the quintessential Trollope novel; and as the title most available through the years, doubtless the most popular Trollope novel. With Barchester Towers he was well on his way to becoming what he had dreamed of years earlier, 'something more than a clerk in the Post Office.'
With Framley Parsonage, as has been seen, Trollope became a bestseller, destined to be dubbed the king of serial novelists during the 1860s. If Dickens and George Eliot remained preeminent, they produced during this decade three and four novels, respectively, while Trollope was coming before his public relentlessly, with some two novels a year, almost always to a good press. In 1865, for example, Miss Mackenzie, little known today, drew rave notices: the London Review called this tale, in which the central character is a spinster of thirty-five, neither witty nor very attractive, a 'bold undertaking'; the Reader saluted it as a novel that 'no one but Mr. Trollope would have had either the hardihood to undertake, or the ability to write so as to be readable'; the Westminster Review, calling Trollope 'our most popular novelist,' said he had never drawn a better female character; The Times wrote, 'We know -471- not any other living writer of fiction who would have been so bold as to undertake the dealing with such a subject.' The Saturday Review said, 'Nobody but Mr. Trollope would have dared to marry a heroine of some forty years to a widower of fifty with nine children.' The high point in his critical career came with The Last Chronicle of Barset in 1867. Reviewers deemed it his best novel to date, a view summed up by Hutton (widely regarded as the shrewdest critic of the Victorian era): 'Of its own kind,' he wrote in the Spectator, 'there has been no better novel ever written than the Last Chronicle of Barset.'
A gradual falling off with the reviewers was to set in, most decidedly with Lady Anna (1874), and continuing through The Way We Live Now (1875), The Prime Minister (1876), The American Senator (1877), and Is He Popenjoy? (1878). Yet during the very last years of his life Trollope had at least six critical successes: John Caldigate (1879) received mostly good reviews; Cousin Henry (1879) did even better; The Duke's Children (1880) enjoyed great acclaim, a markedly different reception from that given four years earlier to the previous Palliser novel, The Prime Minister, Dr. Wortle's School, Ayala's Angel (both 1881), and Mr. Scarborough's Family (written in 1881, posthumous publication 1883) all had a fine press. It is hardly accurate to maintain, as many have done, that at the time of Trollope's death in December 1882 his critical reputation was in tatters.
Then, in October 1883, less than a year later, his Autobiography appeared. All its talk about the mechanical aspects of writing, its downplaying of 'inspiration,' its emphasis on monetary rewards for writers, its insistence on comparing the writing of novels to the making of shoes, led a few contemporaries and many subsequent critics to believe that An Autobiography demolished Trollope's already sinking reputation. This view was fostered by Michael Sadleir, who saw himself as Trollope's twentieth-century apologist. In his introduction to the 1923 World's Classics edition of An Autobiography, Sadleir wrote that the book 'made its posthumous appearance, extinguished its author's good name for a quarter of a century, and vanished.' In Sadleir's influential Trollope: A Commentary (1927) he elaborated, saying that with An Autobiography Trollope 'from beyond the grave… flung in the face of fashionable criticism the aggressive horse-sense of his views on life and book-making'; this caused 'malevolent hostility' and an overwhelming 'tempest of reaction' against his work and ideas. But this scenario does not fit well with the facts. - 472-
For one thing, Trollope's working habits were scarcely a secret, as he had for years gone out of his way to talk about the very things thought to be the shocking «revelations» in the Autobiography. For that matter, reviewers had discussed them. The Westminster Review, for example, had said, 'It is told of Mr. Trollope that he considers his own method of art to be purely mechanical, and that he has declared that he could teach easily any one to write as good books as his own in a short space of time.' The Saturday Review, immediately after Trollope's death, but before the existence of An Autobiography was even heard of, said that only the 'stupid critic' would think 'that the steady regularity of Mr. Trollope's method of work is incompatible with genius.' Furthermore, An Autobiography was universally acclaimed on its publication in 1883. In a laudatory two-part article, the Times combined enthusiasm for 'this extremely frank autobiography' in which was found 'more of the sensational than in any of his novels' with an appreciative survey of Trollope's writings. The revelation of his early miseries reminded the reviewer of those Dickens endured, a comparison made also by the Daily Telegraph and by many other reviews. The Spectator ran three positive reviews of An Autobiography. The Saturday Review admitted to the suspicion that 'had Trollope been content to write a little less, he might have written a little better,' but then drew back, saying, 'It is possible that Trollope's system suited him best.' The Fortnightly Review called An Autobiography a 'most entertaining book,' demonstrating the necessity of 'ceaseless devotion of mind and unintermitting labour of body.' The Morning Post commended its 'entire unreserve' and thought it would encourage 'despondent toilers' to persevere. The Daily Telegraph said the book was a 'flood of light' thrown on the 'inner life of Anthony Trollope… [which] will but serve to make his countrymen regard him with increased admiration and respect.' Other favorable reviews appeared in the Athenaeum, the Academy, the Christian World, the Edinburgh Review, and Blackwood's Magazine. To say that An Autobiography killed Trollope's reputation is to disregard the record. (Among the few earlier critics to raise the issue of Trollope's talk about his writing habits as harmful to his reputation was George Gissing, who gave the question his own twist, saying that he hoped it were true that 'the great big stupid public,' was 'really, somewhere in its secret economy, offended by that revelation of mechanical methods.')
Trollope, like other early Victorian novelists-and for that matter, like all novelists-did undergo a spell of disfavor after his death. -473- According to R. C. Terry, Trollope suffered some dozen years of neglect, leading up to the turn of the century; Sadleir, seeing himself as a 'lonely pioneer for a writer with fairly dubious claims on posterity,' considerably exaggerated Trollope's demise. Three early critics are especially important for the history of Trollope's 'disappearance.' George Saintsbury in 1895 held that Trollope's work was 'of the day and the craftsman, not of eternity and art' and this augured 'comparative oblivion' for him. (A quarter of a century later Saintsbury revised his judgment and placed Trollope just behind Austen, Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray.) In 1907 Herbert Paul pronounced that, although Trollope during his heyday was 'more popular than any of his contemporaries,' his books were now 'dead.' (Both the early Saintsbury and the Paul pieces, incidentally, are wistful, somewhat sad in their dismissal of Trollope; they praise the readability of something they then belittle-an old and long-lasting habit of critics of Trollope's fiction. As early as 1863 an anonymous reviewer of Rachel Ray wrote, 'It may seem rather hard that critics should read Mr. Trollope's novels and enjoy them, and then abuse them for being what they are'; in 1865 the young Henry James, who twenty years later would do a complete about-face, began a review of Miss Mackenzie, 'We have long entertained for Mr. Trollope a partiality of which we have yet been somewhat ashamed.') Lewis Melville, in 1906, wrote that Trollope suffered the 'worst fate that can befall a writer: he has not been abused; he has not been ignored; and he is not disappearing; he has disappeared.' Sadleir's version of the «disappearance» and critical disparagement of Trollope was based largely on Saintsbury, Paul, and Melville. It was surely not based on the American critic William Dean Howells, who during these years was saying that only Trollope could be bracketed with Jane Austen, that he was 'undoubtedly one of he finest of artists,' and that 'the long line of his wise, just, sane novels' were on rereading 'as delightful as ever.'
Some subsequent high points for Trollope's critical reputation can be listed briefly here: the Times Literary Supplements entire front page devoted to Trollope in September 1909; Sadleir's Commentary in 1927; David Cecil's Trollope chapter in his Early Victorian Novelists (1934); the work of Bradford Booth in the 1940s and 1950s, including the founding in 1946 of The Trollopian (subsequently renamed NineteenthCentury Fiction); A. O. J. Cockshut's Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study (1955); and Robert Polhemus's Changing World of, Anthony Trollope (1968). Thereupon has followed an outpouring of work on Trollope, — 474- some thirty full-length critical books, and, in the last five years, four major biographies (R. H. Super, Richard Mullen, N. John Hall, and Victoria Glendinning).
But there exists another and more important reputation, that with readers as opposed to that with critics. Readers Trollope has always had in great abundance. (Writers, too, for Trollope has ever been a writer's writer, from the early days when George Eliot wrote congratulating him on his mastery in organizing 'thoroughly natural everyday incidents,' calling this skill 'among the subtleties of art which can hardly be appreciated except by those who have striven after the same result with conscious failure.') During Trollope's lifetime there was a close correlation between critical and readerly reputations, but since his death that has not been the case until recently.
