The Way They Lived Then / Serious Interviews, Strong Women, and Lessons for Life in the Novels of Anthony Trollope

E-text prepared by Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.

Several pleasant hosts wearing the blue and orange scarves or bow ties of the Trollope Society were circulating through the crowd on a May evening at the Knickerbocker Club in New York, making conversation and bringing the outliers among us into small groupings to join in. These board members were faithfully performing their task of pushing the ball along, as Trollope sometimes put it, at the society's annual dinner. Comparing notes as to what Trollope novel we had last read was the default gambit. One of the books mentioned was Kept in the Dark ; another was He Knew He was Right —a bit beyond the entry-level Barsetshire and Palliser series.
These reviews of all forty-seven of Trollope's novels were written somewhat in the spirit of such dinner-table chatter as one might hear at a meeting of the Trollope Society—appreciative, mostly, but not without a word of criticism here and there. The guests I met were stockbrokers, booksellers, doctors, retirees; and these reviews were written by and for such a reader as one might encounter at a cocktail party—whose interests are a bit more informal than those of grad students searching for original information and insights for their dissertations.
It so happens that my wife and I were introduced to Anthony Trollope through Simon Raven's BBC production of The Pallisers in 1974; a few subsequent television series have brought in other novels. This may qualify as a response to the public media. But if there is any common thread among the faithful readers of Trollope, it is a willingness to pick up something to read that is not on the current best seller list, hardly on a book club list, not something that everyone is talking about.
The better-known and more frequently read of his novels are pretty long. A few have told me that they have read all six of the Barsetshire series, or all six of the Palliser series. A few have stepped out beyond these familiar confines to the relatively uncharted void of his other thirty-five novels. A couple of these, the acclaimed The Way We Live Now and He Knew He Was Right , are available as video copies of television productions. Several others are sitting there on the shelf, waiting for some genius to bring them forward in similar fashion. I have entertained myself at times with generating my own candidates: among these are Orley Farm , The Claverings , and The American Senator .