EARLY LIFE
Anthony Trollope was born at 6 Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, London on April 24, 1815.
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| Anthony Trollope |
Anthony was a large, dirty boy with a large voice. He was unpopular and had no friends as he was thought to be uncouth and clumsy. A great daydreamer as a child, he was miserably unhappy.
Anthony's depressive, bad tempered father, Thomas, was a lawyer of rich descent who lost his attorneys on whom he depended for briefs and money. He gave up his legal practice entirely and took up farming but failed to make enough income to pay rents to his landlord, Lord Northwick and in 1834, he was forced into exile in Belgium to avoid arrest for his debts.
Anthony's mother Frances (March 10, 1779 – October 6, 1863) was an entrepreneur, traveler and novelist. Fanny was in her time the famous Trollope.
Frances Trollope disappeared off to the USA to save the family fortune where she built and designed a bazaar in the frontier town of Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1828, with the intention of selling imported luxury goods. The project failed due to cost overruns and insufficient credit.
On her return to England, Trollope began writing and publication of her 1832 Domestic Manners of the Americans made her famous. She wrote over 100 volumes in total.
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| Oil on canvas of Frances Trollope by Auguste Hervieu, circa 1832 |
Anthony had five brothers and sisters, Thomas, Henry, Arthur (who died in infancy), Cecilia and Emily.
Anthony went to Harrow school as a charity boy aged 8 because his father's farm lay in that neighborhood. After a spell at Arthur Drury’s private school at Sunbury, he followed his two older brothers to Winchester College, where he remained for three years. Anthony returned to Harrow as a day-boy at the age of 15 to reduce the cost of his education.
Anthony was despised at school for his poverty by both pupils and teachers taking repeated floggings. His experiences at these schools were very miserable and he took to daydreaming. Walking a mile walk to and from Harrow twice a day (he went home for lunch) he would be lost in his elaborate inner worlds.
After having his family's debts seized Anthony and his family fled to Belgium. Henry, Emily and Anthony's father all died within a year.
CAREER
As a youngster Trollope hoped to obtain a commission in the Austrian cavalry regiment. To accept it, he needed to be speak French and German, so in order learn them without expense to himself and his family, he took a position as an usher (assistant master) in a school in Brussels. The position made him the tutor of thirty boys.
After a month and a half of tutoring, Trollope 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.
As a clerk for the London post office, Trollope earned a reputation for insubordination.
In 1841, Trollope moved to Ireland as take up a position as travelling inspector for the post office. He based himself in Banagher, King's County, with his work consisting largely of inspection tours in Connaught.
Trollope's post office salary and travel allowance went much further in Ireland than they had in London and put him financially at ease.
Trollope kept precise accounts and was a punctual timekeeper and in 1845 he was promoted in the post office and transferred to another postal district in the south of Ireland, and he moved to Clonmel.
By now Trollope had decided to become a novelist and he began writing during the numerous long railway trips around Ireland that he undertook to carry out his various postal missions. His first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran was published in 1847.
Sir Rowland Hill, Secretary of the Post Office, sent Trollope to Jersey and Guernsey in 1852 to ascertain what could be done about the problem of collecting the mail on a pair of islands where there was irregular sailing times. The novelist had noticed that in Europe, locked cast-iron pillar boxes were placed in convenient locations with regular collection times. His recommendation back to Hill was a "letter-receiving pillar." Hill took up his advice and the first British pillar boxes were opened for public use on Jersey on November 23, 1852. Guernsey received its first three pillar boxes the following February. They were an instant success and the first box on the British mainland was erected in Botchergate, Carlisle later in 1853.
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| This VR pillar box was originally installed in Guernsey in 1853 |
In 1859, Trollope moved back to England having obtained a position in the Post Office as Surveyor to the Eastern District at £800 a year. He retired from the Post Office eight years later, due to the success of his novels.
As well as introducing the pillar box, Trollope is also credited with regulating rural mail deliveries and foreign mails.
Trollope had long dreamed of taking a seat in the House of Commons. As a civil servant, however, he was ineligible for such a position, but his resignation from the Post Office enabled him to put his name forward. In 1868, Trollope agreed to stand as a Liberal candidate in the borough of Beverley, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, but was unsuccessful. After the defeat at Beverley, Trollope concentrated entirely on his literary career.
WRITING
Anthony Trollope was a methodical writer with a hearty, enthusiastic manner.
Trollope had strict rules for writing. His manservant Barney McIntyre woke him at four every morning and he would aim to write 250 words every 15 minutes for three hours, before going off to his job at the Post Office. He believed that by writing for three hours a day he could produce three novels a year and still hold down his day job at the post office. "Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write", he wrote.
Trollope wrote for three hours a day religiously, even when ill and always succeeded in delivering his manuscript to his publisher by the agreed date.
Trollope paid a servant £5 a year to make sure he was at his desk by 5.30 am.
Trollope is best known for his series of novels set in the imaginary county of Barsetshire. The Barsetshire Chronicles concerned the social life of the clergy in the fictional Barsetshire, west England. (Barchester was modelled on Winchester).
The Warden, the first Barsetshire novel was published on January 5, 1855. The story came to him while wandering around Salisbury Cathedral one midsummer evening. It sold so slowly it bought Trollope only £20 3s 9d.
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| First edition title page of The Warden by Anthony Trollope |
In 1857 Anthony Trollope wrote Barchester Towers, the second of his collection of social comedies, The Barsetshire Chronicles.
The rest of the series were published over the following decade:, Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), The Small House at Allington (1864), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867).
Trollope also wrote a series of political novels featuring the Palliser family which are linked by marital and political career of Plantagenet Palliser. These began in 1864 with Can You Forgive Her?. The rest of the series is Phineas Finn (1869), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Phineas Redux (1876), The Prime Minister (1876), and The Duke's Children (1880).
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| First edition title page |
Trollope parceled his own autobiography with instructions "Not to be opened until his death." Following his demise, An Autobiography was published and was a best-seller in London.
Trollope went out of fashion for most of the twentieth century as trends in the world of the novel moved increasingly towards subjectivity and artistic experimentation. However, he enjoyed a critical renaissance in the 1960s. In 1982, the BBC adapted The Warden and Barchester Towers, into the miniseries The Barchester Chronicles which boosted Trollope's book sales.
APPEARANCE AND CHARACTER
A large man, not quite 6 ft, beneath his spectacles, Trollope had fierce dark eyes. He had an ugly red face, bushy sideburns and grizzled beard. By the 1880s, Trollope had a very large bushy grey beard and receding hairline on top.
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| Anthony Trollope |
The novelist Henry James wrote in a 1875 letter to his family. "He has a gross and repulsive face."
Trollope was a scruffy man; his clothes look permanently ruffled.
Trollope was sensible and soft-hearted and good with children.
He was loud in every way with a noisy bass voice and plenty of laughter. The literary historian Michael Sadleir describes Trollope as "scarcely giving himself time to think, but spluttering and roaring out an instantly formed opinion couched in the very strongest of terms."
RELATIONSHIPS
Trollope first met Rose Heseltine, the daughter of a Rotherham bank manager, in a pub in Kingstown, Ireland in 1842, where he was working and she on holiday with parents in 1842. He proposed to her on the beach at Dun Laoghaire, Ireland and they married on June 11, 1844.
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| Rose Heseltine Trollope |
Rose Heseltine Trollope (1820-1917) was an efficient, neat, northern girl. She bore him two sons.
It was a good marriage though it was later said he was married to his books.
The novelist, Joanna Trollope is Trollope's fifth Great Niece.
Trollope socialized at the Garrick club. He was an entertaining companion full of high spirits, joking and playful.
BELIEFS
Trollope was an adherent of high church Anglicanism with a dislike of the low church evangelical movement. Despite his high church leanings, he shied away from any quasi-Catholic sentiments.
HOBBIES AND INTERESTS
Despite being of great weight, Trollope had a passion for fox hunting, and two or three times a week he went hunting on a cart horse leaving destruction everywhere.
Trollope smoked cigars and enjoyed roast chestnuts, grapes and lemonade.
He was a good eater and connoisseur of wine. To a lady who noticed that he helped himself generously from every dish offered to him and who had commented "you seem to have a very good appetite", Trollope replied "none at all madam , but thank God I am greedy."
Trollope played frequent games of whist at the Garrick Club.
He loved reading. Trollope said: "Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for his creatures."
Trollope kept a diary for ten years then destroyed it.
LAST YEARS AND DEATH
Trollope suffered from gout and was extremely short-sighted.
At an advanced age he fought asthma and suspicion of anginia pectoris.
Trollope was laughing at a family reading of F Anstey’s Vice Versa at his brother in law’s evening party when he was struck down by a paralytic stroke. He died a month later aged 67 on December 6, 1882 in a nursing home on the site of 34 Welbeck Street, London.
Trollope was interred in Kensal Green Cemetery, London, where his literary contemporary Wilkie Collins is also buried and transferred to Poets' Corner in 1993.
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