Anthony Trollope born 1815-1882

About:

Anthony Trollope was born in Bloomsbury, London in 1815. His father was a barrister whose ill-temper ensured the fairly radical descent of the family’s fortunes and his mother, in response to this descent, became a successful writer. Trollope was educated as a member of the nineteenth century upper middle classes, at Harrow and Winchester but his attendance at the schools was fitful in keeping with his family’s inability to pay for his education and this left him open to cruel bullying.

His mother’s writing came about almost by chance, as the last of a sequence of efforts to keep the family afloat. In 1827 she had left for America with three of her sons, a bluestocking and an artist, leaving the young Anthony behind. Several projects later and having returned to England only to have to bolt with her family to Belgium to avoid her husband’s debtors, she wrote the story of one of her doomed projects in America, published the result and scored an immediate hit.

The financial security she thereby secured for her family was not enough to save Anthony from being denied the University education expected of him, and which he was unable to gain for himself with a scholarship. He had instead to make do with a position, secured for him by his mother, as a junior civil servant in the British Post Office. In 1841 The Post Office sent him to Ireland where, with his wife who he married in 1844, he led a very contented life. On his first holiday, in 1847, he returned to England to introduce his wife to his mother and at the same time showed her a manuscript of a book he had been working on The Macdermots of Ballycloran, she reputedly did not read the book but did send it to her publishers who accepted it. Neither the Macdermots nor his two following novels met with any public success, Ireland not being very popular at the time in England, but on being posted back to England in 1851 Trollope began writing The Warden the first of what would become known as The Barchester Chronicles. It was published in 1855 and became an instant public hit.

From then on Trollope began the dual life that enabled so many literary snobs to dismiss him for so long. Whilst maintaining his position in the Post Office and indeed advancing steadily to become Surveyor General, (he is generally credited with having introduced the iconic British red Pillar Box), he would allocate to each day an exact portion for writing his novels. It was this systematic approach to literature that so annoyed his critics, that and his prodigious output. Both sins are of course shared by many other great writers, Gustave Flaubert and Charles Dickens to name a couple. Whatever the method, the result was hugely successful, initially financially and thereafter critically. His Barchester Chronicles and the political equivalent The Pallisers have become mainstays of the British literary canon.

Having started life on such an unpromising note, Trollope is reputed to have died laughing, in 1882, in London. In fact it seems that he had a stroke brought on by a particularly funny family reading of F. Anstey's Vice Versa, and died a month later from the complications of the stroke and his increasing asthma. However, he had indeed obtained for himself a truly enjoyable life through his writing and his astonishing library of books amuse and intrigue us still.