Anthony Trollope: An Autobiography

I have to agree with my sister that Trollope's Autobiography is for diehard fans. Having read 23 of his novels, I put myself in that category, and, still, this book was an occasional slog. The early chapters were painfully sad memories of his poverty-stricken childhood and how he eked out an education at Harrow where he was regularly beaten. At nineteen, he left school and came home to find his father fleeing to Belgium and his mother dismantling the household in order to pay the creditors. The whole family joined the father in Europe, and since almost all of them were dying of consumption, his mother took on the full support of the family with her novel writing. Trollope's admiration for her knows no bounds:

The doctor’s vials and the ink-bottle held equal places in my mother’s rooms. I have written many novels under many circumstances, but I doubt much whether I could write one when my whole heart was by the bedside of a dying son. Her power of dividing herself into two parts, and keeping her intellect by itself clear from the troubles of the world, and fit for the duty it had to do, I never saw equaled. I do not think that the writing of novel is the most difficult task which a man may be called upon to do, but it is a task that may be supposed to demand a spirit fairly at ease…. My mother went through it unscathed in strength, though she performed all the work of day-nurse and night-nurse to a sick household – for there were soon three of them dying. 

Soon he was summoned to work as a clerk in the London Post office. He gives detailed descriptions of his post office duties through the years and how he managed to begin his own career as a novelist; he recalls his different books and how long they took to write and how much he got paid for them. Sometimes he compares how he felt about them with what the public felt about them.  (He didn’t give a hang about public opinion.) Regarding TheSmall House at Allington, he wrote, In it appeared Lily Dale, one of the characters which readers of my novels have liked the best. In the love with which she has been greeted I have hardly joined with much enthusiasm, feeling that she is somewhat of a prig. 

Chapter Thirteen was a commentary on fellow Victorian novelists and includes Trollope’s fascinating predictions of who would last and who would fade away. His “keepers” are Thackeray and George Eliot. He acknowledges Dicken’s popularity, but vehemently disagrees with it. His predictions for the “losers” were mostly right. He predicted that the novels of Charles Read, Henry Bulwer, Annie Thackeray, Rhoda Broughton, Charles Lever and Charlotte Brontë (!) would sink into oblivion.   

Although parts of this book were tedious, I was sad when it was over. The narrator, Bernard Mayes (with his grandfatherly British voice), did such a good job that I felt like I had just had a long conversation with a good friend that suddenly came to an end.

I will close with a favorite quote from Clifton Fadiman: Above all give me Trollope, from whom I have received so much pleasure that I would willingly call him another St. Anthony; his half a hundred novels are good for five years of bedside reading. Of those who minister to the tired, night-welcoming mind, Trollope is king. He never fails to interest, but not too much; to soothe, but not too much. Trollope is the perfect novelist for the bedside.

Blessings,