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Anthony Trollope

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Anthony Trollope (/ˈtrɒləp/; 24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882) was an English novelist and civil servant of the Victorian era. Among his best-known works is a series of novels collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, which revolves around the imaginary county of Barsetshire. He also wrote novels on political, social, and gender issues, and other topical matters.

Quick facts: Born, Died …
Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he had regained the esteem of critics by the mid-20th century.

Biography
Anthony Trollope was the son of barrister Thomas Anthony Trollope and the novelist and travel writer Frances Milton Trollope. Though a clever and well-educated man and a Fellow of New College, Oxford, he failed at the Bar due to his bad temper. In addition, his ventures into farming proved unprofitable, and he lost an expected inheritance when an elderly childless uncle remarried and had children. Thomas Trollope was son of Rev. (Thomas) Anthony Trollope, rector of Cottered, Hertfordshire, himself the sixth son of Sir Thomas Trollope, 4th Baronet. The baronetcy later came to descendants of Anthony Trollope's second son, Frederick. As a son of landed gentry, Thomas Trollope wanted his sons to be raised as gentlemen and to attend Oxford or Cambridge. Anthony Trollope suffered much misery in his boyhood owing to the disparity between the privileged background of his parents and their comparatively small means.

Millais, John Everett (1861), "Julians on Harrow Hill, Trollope's boyhood home", Orley Farm (drawing) (1st ed.), frontispiece.

Grandon, Monken Hadley. Home to Anthony and his mother 1836–38.
Born in London, Anthony attended Harrow School as a free day pupil for three years from the age of seven because his father's farm, acquired for that reason, lay in that neighbourhood. After a spell at a private school at Sunbury, he followed his father and two older brothers to Winchester College, where he remained for three years. He returned to Harrow as a day-boy to reduce the cost of his education. Trollope had some very miserable experiences at these two public schools. They ranked as two of the most élite schools in England, but Trollope had no money and no friends, and was bullied a great deal. At the age of twelve, he fantasised about suicide. However, he also daydreamed, constructing elaborate imaginary worlds.

In 1827, his mother Frances Trollope moved to America with Trollope's three younger siblings, to Nashoba Commune. After that failed, she opened a bazaar in Cincinnati, which proved unsuccessful. Thomas Trollope joined them for a short time before returning to the farm at Harrow, but Anthony stayed in England throughout. His mother returned in 1831 and rapidly made a name for herself as a writer, soon earning a good income. His father's affairs, however, went from bad to worse. He gave up his legal practice entirely and failed to make enough income from farming to pay rents to his landlord, Lord Northwick. In 1834, he fled to Belgium to avoid arrest for debt. The whole family moved to a house near Bruges, where they lived entirely on Frances's earnings.

In Belgium, Anthony was offered a commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment. To accept it, he needed to learn French and German; he had a year in which to acquire these languages. To learn them without expense to himself and his family, he took a position as an usher (assistant master) in a school in Brussels, which position made him the tutor of thirty boys. After six weeks of this, however, he received an offer of a clerkship in the General Post Office, obtained through a family friend. He returned to London in the autumn of 1834 to take up this post. Thomas Trollope died the following year.

According to Trollope, "the first seven years of my official life were neither creditable to myself nor useful to the public service." At the Post Office, he acquired a reputation for unpunctuality and insubordination. A debt of £12 to a tailor fell into the hands of a moneylender and grew to over £200; the lender regularly visited Trollope at his work to demand payments. Trollope hated his work, but saw no alternative and lived in constant fear of dismissal.

Tombs of Thomas and Henry Trollope, cemetery of Bruges in Belgium
Move to Ireland

Rose Heseltine Trollope
In 1841, an opportunity to escape offered itself. A postal surveyor's clerk in central Ireland was reported as being incompetent and in need of replacement. The position was not regarded as a desirable one at all; but Trollope, in debt and in trouble at his office, volunteered for it; and his supervisor, William Maberly, eager to be rid of him, appointed him to the position.

Trollope based himself in Banagher, King's County, with his work consisting largely of inspection tours in Connaught. Although he had arrived with a bad reference from London, his new supervisor resolved to judge him on his merits; by Trollope's account, within a year he had the reputation of a valuable public servant. His salary and travel allowance went much further in Ireland than they had in London, and he found himself enjoying a measure of prosperity. He took up fox hunting, which he pursued enthusiastically for the next three decades. His professional role as a post-office surveyor brought him into contact with Irish people, and he found them pleasant company: "The Irish people did not murder me, nor did they even break my head. I soon found them to be good-humoured, clever—the working classes very much more intelligent than those of England—economical and hospitable."

At the watering place of Kingstown, Trollope met Rose Heseltine, the daughter of a Rotherham bank manager. They became engaged when he had been in Ireland for a year; because of Trollope's debts and her lack of a fortune, they were unable to marry until 1844. Their first son, Henry Merivale, was born in 1846, and the second, Frederick James Anthony, in 1847. Soon after their marriage, Trollope transferred to another postal district in the south of Ireland, and the family moved to Clonmel.

Early works
Though Trollope had decided to become a novelist, he had accomplished very little writing during his first three years in Ireland. At the time of his marriage, he had only written the first of three volumes of his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran. Within a year of his marriage, he finished that work.

Trollope began writing on the numerous long train trips around Ireland he had to take to carry out his postal duties. Setting very firm goals about how much he would write each day, he eventually became one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote his earliest novels while working as a Post Office inspector, occasionally dipping into the "lost-letter" box for ideas.

Plaque on Custom House in Belfast, where Trollope maintained his office as Postal Surveyor for Northern Ireland.
Significantly, many of his earliest novels have Ireland as their setting—natural enough given his background, but unlikely to enjoy warm critical reception, given the contemporary English attitude towards Ireland. Critics have pointed out that Trollope's view of Ireland separates him from many of the other Victorian novelists. Some critics claim that Ireland did not influence Trollope as much as his experience in England, and that the society in Ireland harmed him as a writer, especially since Ireland was experiencing the Great Famine during his time there. Such critics were dismissed as holding bigoted opinions against Ireland and failing to recognise Trollope's true attachment to the country.

Trollope wrote four novels about Ireland. Two were written during the Great Famine, while the third deals with the famine as a theme (The Macdermots of Ballycloran, The Kellys and the O'Kellys, and Castle Richmond, respectively). The Macdermots of Ballycloran was written while he was staying in the village of Drumsna, County Leitrim. The Kellys and the O'Kellys (1848) is a humorous comparison of the romantic pursuits of the landed gentry (Francis O'Kelly, Lord Ballindine) and his Catholic tenant (Martin Kelly). Two short stories deal with Ireland ("The O'Conors of Castle Conor, County Mayo" and "Father Giles of Ballymoy"). Some critics argue that these works seek to unify an Irish and British identity, instead of viewing the two as distinct. Even as an Englishman in Ireland, Trollope was still able to attain what he saw as essential to being an "Irish writer": possessed, obsessed, and "mauled" by Ireland.

The reception of the Irish works left much to be desired. Henry Colburn wrote to Trollope, "It is evident that readers do not like novels on Irish subjects as well as on others." In particular, magazines such as The New Monthly Magazine, which included reviews that attacked the Irish for their actions during the famine, were representative of the dismissal by English readers of any work written about the Irish.

Success as an author
In 1851, Trollope was sent to England, charged with investigating and reorganising rural mail delivery in south-western England and south Wales. The two-year mission took him over much of Great Britain, often on horseback. Trollope describes this time as "two of the happiest years of my life".

In the course of it, he visited Salisbury Cathedral; and there, according to his autobiography, he conceived the plot of The Warden, which became the first of the six Barsetshire novels. His postal work delayed the beginning of writing for a year; the novel was published in 1855, in an edition of 1,000 copies, with Trollope receiving half of the profits: £9 8s. 8d. in 1855, and £10 15s. 1d. in 1856. Although the profits were not large, the book received notices in the press, and brought Trollope to the attention of the novel-reading public.

He immediately began work on Barchester Towers, the second Barsetshire novel; upon its publication in 1857, he received an advance payment of £100 (about £10,100 in 2019 consumer pounds) against his share of the profits. Like The Warden, Barchester Towers did not obtain large sales, but it helped to establish Trollope's reputation. In his autobiography, Trollope writes, "It achieved no great reputation, but it was one of the novels which novel readers were called upon to read." For the following novel, The Three Clerks, he was able to sell the copyright for a lump sum of £250; he preferred this to waiting for a share of future profits.

Trollope Ireland Anthony Trollope's Novels Thomas Irish Years