INTRODUCTION
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.
Trollope sabotaged his own reputation with his disclosure of his writing habits, and it may never recover. The very idea that anyone could approach writing without appealing to the muse, just getting up every morning and doing it—two hours every morning, with a self-imposed quota of words to write! The muse was not amused, and her devotees have been unforgiving. If this confession had been well known during his years in service, I suspect that his advancement would have been significantly curtailed. The public requires its geniuses to be seized by the spirit. It's not as if just anybody could do it. An inspired author must rise from a dinner table full of guests when gripped by his muse, as did Charles Dickens, and, as if in a trance, transcribe the words dictated by the spirit.
Any respectable agent, if Trollope had had one, would surely have warned him about the risks of overexposure. Even the great and prolific Dickens wrote only about a dozen novels. Jane Austen wrote six. George Eliot and the Brontes only wrote a few.
A prodigious writer must necessarily have a little tool box, deploying and mixing different plot devices, assumptions about society, views on current issues, and references to the way they lived then—which was different in many ways from our own world, and similar in others.
One of his favorite tools was the Serious Interview, and few writers have used it to such advantage as did Trollope. He introduces this device in a chapter entitled "The Serious Interview" in Barchester Towers, one of his early novels, in which Archdeacon Grantly makes the strategic error of engaging his sister-in-law Eleanor Bold about his suspicion that she is about to accept a marriage proposal from the sly and scheming Rev. Slope. The components of the Serious Interview are present in this prototype:
The prologue, in which Trollope explains to the reader that there are some who delight in offering advice or administering rebuke, and that the archdeacon is among these.