Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-12T19:39:00.073Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - Anthony Trollope

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2010

Adrian Poole
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Get access

Summary

Of the great Victorian novelists, Anthony Trollope (1815-82) was the most prolific, and he was justly regarded as the foremost presenter of the lives of the professional and landed classes whose members provided the core of his readership. Many of his novels first appeared in parts or as serials in magazines, giving his fiction the currency which nowadays we can compare only to serial drama on television. One obituarist went so far as to write that his work 'will picture the society of our day with a fidelity with which society has never been pictured before in the history of the world'. Born in London in 1815, the fourth surviving child of a failing barrister with a difficult personality and grandiose expectations, the novelist spent a miserable childhood and youth. Because of his poverty he felt himself an outcast at Harrow and Winchester, where he was a scholastic failure. He felt further rejected when his mother abandoned him for four years at the age of twelve to go to America in a vain attempt to save the family's fortunes, leaving Anthony with his father, who was by now in a mental state verging on insanity. After his father's inevitable bankruptcy, Frances Trollope turned author in her early fifties, achieving fame and prosperity with Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and a flow of successful novels through the 1830s and 1840s. Through a family contact, Anthony was found a clerkship in the Post Office, and after a period in London he was posted to Ireland, where he became a reliable and energetic public servant. In 1844 he married Rose Heseltine, about whom we know little, except that she was an expert household manager, and her husband relied on her literary judgement throughout his life.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Anthony Trollope
  • Edited by Adrian Poole, University of Cambridge
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists
  • Online publication: 28 March 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521871198.014
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Anthony Trollope
  • Edited by Adrian Poole, University of Cambridge
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists
  • Online publication: 28 March 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521871198.014
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Anthony Trollope
  • Edited by Adrian Poole, University of Cambridge
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists
  • Online publication: 28 March 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521871198.014
Available formats
×