With the 'common reader' Trollope's popularity has been and is extraordinary, and we know this not from the judgments and speculations of literary critics but from publishers' records. To take but the period of supposed greatest neglect, 1885 through 1915: a very incomplete tally for these thirty years shows that British publishers (including Ward Lock, Chapman & Hall, Chatto & Windus, Smith Elder, Longman, Macmillan, Bentley, John Lane, Blackie, Long, Bell, Dent, Oxford, Cassell, Collins, Routledge, Nelson, Bohn, Butterworth, Lever, Blackwood, and Sampson Low) issued more than 180 combined editions and reprintings of his books. American publishers (including Munro, Millar, Dodd Mead, Knight, Lupton, Lovell Coryell, Harpers, Page, Gebbie, Fowle, Century, DuMont, Dutton, Winston, Burt, and Lippincott) produced the even more impressive figure of almost 300 editions and reprintings. Even though the size of the printings is for the most part unknowable, the numbers are remarkable. It is clear that Trollope never suffered anything even remotely resembling total eclipse, even during years when his critical reputation was at its lowest. Today Trollope is more read than at any time since his own day. This fact is attested to by the great number of Trollope editions in print, a number that could soon reach the phenomenal total of 250, as Penguin Books follows Oxford University Press World's Classics in bringing out its own uniform paperback editions of all the novels, the short stories, and An Autobiography. And because very few of these books are produced for the lucrative classroom market-with its captive audiences-it may be said that more people choose to read Trollope than any other classic English -475- author. The aforementioned recent outburst of critical attention simply means that Trollope criticism is catching up with the so-called ordinary reader, not to mention fellow novelists, in admiration for and loyalty to Trollope.
Meanwhile the ' Trollope problem' persists in spite of admirable efforts by critics to explain him. It begins with the preliminary question of which Trollope books merit the most attention. The 'chaos of criticism' articulated by Bradford Booth in 1958 still obtains: 'Among Trollope's forty-seven novels there are only a handful that someone has not called his best.' That critics and readers would disagree about the relative merits of books amid so large a number is only natural. But the degree of difference of opinion about Trollope's novels is singular. No one believes that Barnaby Rudge is Dickens's greatest work, or Philip Thackeray's, or Romola George Eliot's. But in Trollope's case, there are people who rate, say, Is He Popenjoy? as on a par with anything he ever wrote, while others dismiss it out of hand. Listing one's favorites among Trollope's many titles has long been a kind of unwinnable, endless game his readers play among themselves. It is true that from the first many people have given pride of place to the six novels of the Barchester series, with special favor going to Barchester Towers (often thought of as Trollope's Pride and Prejudice in wide appeal) and to The Last Chronicle-many people's choice, and Trollope's own, for his single best novel. Among other Barsetshire titles, Trollope's contemporaries set great store by Doctor Thorne and Framley Parsonage; later generations seem to give the edge to The Small House at Allington. Next in popularity, and for many twentieth-century readers an even more sustained and realized achievement, has been the six-novel Palliser series, admired largely as a collective portrait of Plantagenet Palliser and Lady Glencora; among these books, in Trollope's day The Eustace Diamonds may have been most popular; today the nod would perhaps go to the Phineas novels or The Duke's Children. Among the «independent» novels, Orley Farm stood out in Trollope's day, The Way We Live Now in ours. Other especially well-received works in Trollope's time were The Three Clerks and Rachel Ray; in the twentieth century, Dr. Wortle's School and Ayala's Angel. But strong claims are made for He Knew He Was Right and Is He Popenjoy? One would have thought that with the winnowing of time some agreement would be nearer, but such is hardly the case, owing chiefly to Trollope's startling evenness. The 'essential Trollope' was -476- present from beginning to end, a fact attested to by the high critical regard that has settled upon The Macdermots of Ballycloran, his very first novel, and upon Mr. Scarborough's Family, finished about a year before his death.And, of course, the question of what constitutes the peculiar excellence of this 'essential Trollope' is equally unanswerable. It probably lies in some elusive and complex mix-the proportions varying with each reader-of all those elements very different kinds of critics have praised in his works: the uncanny «realism» of his characters (this would have been Trollope's own explanation); his convincing dialogue; his believable plots; his talent for 'dramatizing the undramatic'; his sympathy for all his characters; his 'looking to circumstances' by a kind of foreshadowing of what today is called situation ethics; his 'natural psychology'; his «photographic» fidelity in depicting social mores; the abiding comic vision; the pervasive presence of his narrator, whose worldly-wise yet kindly voice often makes even his less successful novels so readable; the plain, unobtrusive style, a style that doesn't call attention to itself but is nonetheless loaded with almost constant irony, an irony so quiet, nuanced, and subtle as frequently to go undetected. To fall back on this 'little bit of each' approach may seem critically unadventurous. But at least it is sound. And it adds up, I think, to an endorsement of a dictum set forth by Gordon Ray, in one of the most useful essays on its subject: 'Trollope was a great, truthful, varied artist, who wrote better than he or his contemporaries realized, and who left behind him more novels of lasting value that any other writer in English.' That seems fair enough.
N. John Hall
Selected Bibliography Booth Bradford A. Anthony Trollope: Aspects of His Life and Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958.
Cockshut A. O. J. Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study. London: Collins, 1955.
Hall N. John. Trollope: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.
Hall N. John, ed. The Trollope Critics. London: Macmillan, 1981.
Halperin John. Trollope and Politics: A Study of the Pallisers and Others. London: Macmillan, 1977.
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Herbert Christopher. Trollope and Comic Pleasure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Kincaid James R. The Novels of Anthony Trollope. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977.
Polhemus Robert M. The Changing World of Anthony Trollope. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968.
Sadleir Michael. Trollope: A Commentary. 1927. 3d ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.
Terry R. C. Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding. London: Macmillan, 1977.
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Wilkie Collins and the Sensation Novel
The sensation of a moment often makes the thought of a life.
Wilkie Collins, Basil: A Story of Modern Life
THE critical history of sensation fiction reads remarkably like the plot of a typical sensation novel itself. Sometime around 1890, sensation novels mysteriously established themselves in the literary marketplace in England, where they met with astounding popularity and financial success. Like one of the scheming impersonators from their plots, however, the texts themselves were soon exposed by critics as frauds and condemned as unworthy even to bear the name 'literature.' About a decade later, just as mysteriously, sensation fiction essentially disappeared from the literary landscape, only to resurface toward the end of the century, this time disguised as another popular genre, the detective novel. It, too, was recognized and unmasked by scrupulous literary critics as an insignificant and possibly even dangerous form of escapism, unworthy of serious literary consideration but requiring severe moral opprobrium. When the techniques and conventions of popular art were appropriated by high modernist and postmodernist writers in the twentieth century, however, and even more recently, as the traditional standards of canon formation came under attack in the academy, literary critics once again exhumed the body of texts that made such a sensation in the 1860s, declaring them, almost melodramatically, to be authentic and valuable literary documents after all. If the sensation novel is considered as a legitimate example of «popular» culture, more significant for having been marginalized, its previous repudiation may be interpreted as revealing more about the serious threat it posed to the values of the dominant culture that rejected it than -479- about its genuine literary merits. The «plot» of such a critical history, in fact, underscores
