When I mention that Anthony Trollope is one of my favorite authors, I get eye rolls, even among Downton Abbey fans, a series that I don’t care for because I think it is the Gone With The Wind of the British aristocracy.
I won’t get into why I prefer Trollope— any Trollope, even The Fixed Period— to Downton Abbey, but I have many reasons, which I might get into in another post, but not now.
Anthony Trollope was a mid-nineteenth century British Victorian novelist, roughly contemporary with Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, the Brontë’s, and George Elliot. He was somewhat older than Thomas Hardy who wrote well into the twentieth century. Jane Austen preceded Trollope, straddling the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Although Trollope is by far my favorite among the Victorians, I notice that he is not listed among Victorian novelists in the Wikipedia article on Victorian Literature, not even in in the subsection on other Victorian writers. Why is that? I am not an expert, but in his own time, Trollope’s contemporaries accused him of being too prolific and too commercial. He was not ashamed to fret over payment for his books.
Trollope was a bureaucrat in the British postal system and he often wrote while traveling on official business. He kept to a strict schedule, rising early to get in his daily quota of words and said that if he finished one book during a writing session, he started his next without pausing. He kept meticulous records of his number of words per day.
In other words, Anthony Trollope was a novel writing machine. He wrote forty-seven novels in addition to short stories, travel books, a history of the English clergy, an autobiography, and other writings on miscellaneous subjects. Contemporary critics roundly condemned him for being overly prolific. Today, he might be accused of being a hack, of substituting quantity for quality.
Myself, I am profoundly grateful that Trollope wrote every day and turned out books one after another. I have been reading Trollope regularly for thirty years now, and there are still books I am looking forward to reading for the first time and there are others that seem completely new because it has been so long since I read them.
Some things make it easy to become a Trollope enthusiast. Project Gutenberg has made most of his books free in electronic editions. Amazon also has many of Trollope’s works available electronically at nominal price or free. These electronic versions are not perfect— the transcription process introduces a few errors and they are often the product of enthusiasts rather than experts, but they are still very readable. Cheap used paper copies are also easy to find on-line.
For me, however, the gem is the Group Reading of Anthony Trollope , which I call the “Trollope list.” The Trollope list reads a book by Trollope together every two or three months. I think they are unique in that a volunteer member of the group summarizes each week’s chapters. This is startlingly effective. The summaries spark discussion, and busy people who have trouble keeping up with their reading, can keep up with the discussion based on the summaries even when they have slipped behind. I admit to occasionally reading only the summaries during a busy week and skipping a few chapters in my own reading. This makes group reading so much less onerous. You can relax and enjoy Trollope instead of worrying about finishing a reading assignment each week.
I cannot say enough about the group members. Some are academics, some are dilettantes like me, others are just enthusiastic readers. The discussions are wide ranging—some go into Victorian arcana, others apply Trollope’s insights into contemporary society, some revel in the Trollope’s romance and dramatic tension. Anyone who enjoys Dickens or Jane Austen should dip into Trollope. He touches many of the same topics, but with a different style and perspective that I find fascinating.
The Group Reading of Anthony Trollope is an excellent starting point for getting to know Trollope. The group is well into Phineas Finn at this writing, but do drop in, you may find that starting in the middle, “in medea res,” works for you. You must join to participate or read the discussion, but it’s all free. Civility and absence of politics are the rule. There are no trolls on the Trollope list.
If you don’t care for the daily and hourly emails of an active group, opt for “no email” and go to the group website, Group Reading of Anthony Trollope when you feel like it. You only get one email a day if you go for a “daily summary.” My choice is to enjoy the continual conversation of “individual messages.” You can subscribe below.
