Anthony Trollope: A Companion PDF
Preview Anthony Trollope: A Companion
Anthony Trollope McFarland Companions to 19th Century Literature Alfred Tennyson: A Companion by Laurence W. Mazzeno (2020) Anthony Trollope: A Companion by Nicholas Birns and John F. Wirenius (2021) Herman Melville: A Companion by Corey Evan Thompson (2021) Jane Austen: A Companion by Laura Dabundo (2021) Thomas Hardy: A Companion to the Novels by Ronald D. Morrison (2021) Anthony Trollope A Companion Nicholas Birns and John F. Wirenius McFarland Companions to 19th Century Literature Series Editor Laurence W. Mazzeno Associate Editor Sue Norton McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina McFarland Companions to Nineteenth-Century Literature is a series of scholarly monographs designed as guides to the work of important British, American, and Continental writers whose work appeared during the long 19th century. Each volume is prepared by an experienced scholar-teacher and focuses on the writer’s most frequently read fiction, poetry, or nonfiction. Written to aid students and teachers, each com- panion contains a biography, an Introduction explaining the writer’s importance, a list of major publications, an alphabetical listing of entries that discuss the writer’s works and provide information on people, places, events, and issues that affected the author’s literary career, and a selected bibliography of recent criticism. ISBN (print) 9 78–1 -4766–7 769–9 ISBN (ebook) 9 78–1 -4766–4 425–7 Library of Congress and British Library cataloguing data are available Library of Congress Control Number 2021045976 © 2021 Nicholas Birns and John F. Wirenius. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Front cover image: Anthony Trollope, 1878 (British Library) Printed in the United States of America McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com Table of Contents Acknowledgments vi Preface 1 Abbreviations 2 Introduction 3 Anthony Trollope: A Brief Biography 9 Chronological List of Trollope’s Major Publications 14 Anthony Trollope: A Companion 19 Appendix: General Secondary Bibliography of Anthony Trollope 225 Works Cited 229 Index 233 v Acknowledgments John Wirenius has been a wonderful, knowledgeable, and resourceful collaborator and it has been a pleasure to experience his encyclopedic knowledge of Trollope, British literature, and the Victorian age. I would like to thank my lovely wife, Isabella Smalera Birns; my mother and longtime fellow Trollopian, Margaret Boe Birns; as well as col- leagues Lauren Goodlad, Doug Gerlach, Steven Amarnick, Michael Williamson, Eliz- abeth Howard, Randy Williams, and Ellen Moody. The Trollope conference at Leuven in 2015 was vital to making this book possible and I thank Frederik van Dam, Ortwin de Graef, and all the other conveners and organizers, as well as the Trollope Society in both the UK and US. I would also like to thank all those who worked on Trollope in the decades when doing so was not prestigious in academia, for keeping discussion of his work alive and providing the ground for efforts like this that transpire in more fruitful times. —Nicholas Birns To begin, it is a genuine pleasure to collaborate with Nicholas Birns on this vol- ume, and I thank him for inviting me to join him on this ramble through Trollope Country. The late Walter Kendrick, who taught English literature at Fordham College, was a marvelous, witty professor. His own work on Trollope, The Novel Machine: The Theory and Fiction of Anthony Trollope (1980) introduced me to Trollopean criticism. Ellen Moody’s Trollope on the Net (1999) and her other essays, whether in journals, books, or online, always raise interesting challenges to traditional views on Trollope and invite further investigation. The first complete edition of The Duke’s Children and its scholarly apparatus offer a whole new vista of Trollope at work, and the building blocks of his world. Steven Amarnick, Robert F. Wiseman, and Susan Lowell Hum- phries have not just restored a classic to its full power, they have given us new insights into Trollope’s commitment to his characters and his readers. My beloved wife Cath- erine has endured weekends, vacations, and ordinary time with me hunched over my old laptop, searching through old (and new) journal articles on Trollope and all things Victorian. I couldn’t do it without her generous support, and her occasional arched brow at my less plausible readings. —John F. Wirenius vi Preface This book seeks to combine the enthusiasm of the general reader with the schol- arship of the academic reader to give both students and a wider ring of devotees access to and information about Anthony Trollope and the people and contexts important to him. Trollope is an entertainer writing in a commercial genre, but this does not mean that he is not also a major novelist whose achievement is an artistic one. Our aim in his book is to unite the scholars’ and the enthusiasts’ Trollope. We also wish, as Americans, to give a due sense of this writer’s international and cosmopolitan aspects but, equally, to situate him in his uniquely English and Victorian contexts. We have placed the emphasis on Trollope’s works, but also included entries on key friends (and enemies) in his life, his major interests and affiliations, as well as import- ant themes and techniques in his work. Every novel of Trollope’s receives an individual entry. Most space is given to the Palliser and Barsetshire novels, and to such major stand-alone works as Orley Farm and The Way We Live Now. But there are full entries on the individual novels, travel books, and books of short fiction. Nearly everything Trollope ever published is mentioned, and the vast majority receive full consideration, from “Malachi’s Cove” to Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite. We have tried to give an idea of the major movements of the plot in the entries on fiction without going into plot summary as such or naming every single character. Our stress is on the value the novels have in themselves as well as their place in Trollope’s entire oeuvre. We also wish to pay appropriate attention to the various phases of Trollope’s ca- reer. Early Trollope might be defined as ending with the mature achievement of Orley Farm. Middle Trollope is defined as going from that novel to the return from his second trip to Australia. Late Trollope begins with the books too late to be mentioned in An Autobiography. 1 Abbreviations Auto—An Autobiography CYFH—Can You Forgive Her? DC—The Duke’s Children ED—Eustace Diamonds Ph F—Phineas Finn Ph R—Phineas Redux PM—The Prime Minister 2 Introduction The general reader probably has three associations with Anthony Trollope: that he is prolific, heartily English, and indelibly Victorian. The prolificity is a fact. Com- bined with what most people took from An Autobiography—that Trollope wrote for money, and was unashamed of it—the aura of being a hack has hung over him. Whereas George Eliot completed seven novels, and Dickens fourteen, Trollope published more than forty. Although other nineteenth-century novelists—George Sand, Benito Pérez Galdós, James Fenimore Cooper—matched Trollope’s level of production, none sur- passed it, and certainly nobody in England. Trollope’s prolific output means that each of his novels is not so different from the others as to constitute a significantly different imaginative world. With Dickens, Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son are two distinct realms of experience, even though depicted by the same hand, or with Shakespeare, where G. Wilson Knight could speak of the universe of King Lear, one shared by no other play. By contrast, Trollope’s novels often occur in the same world; characters cross from their own books to scarcely related ones. Far from resulting from a lack of inven- tion, these crossovers add to the depth of the imagined world, and sometimes allow the reader to see old friends in a different light. One has to see the delight in Trollope as being largely one of theme and variation. His copiousness is an example of someone willing to adapt a core technique to a variety of forms and circumstances, as Haydn did in symphonic music and Rossini in opera. The reader understandably infers the prototype of what a Trollope novel is, but there are notable differences in the mood, concerns, and tonalities of individual novels. There is a sense where it is helpful to assume there is one “Trollope.” At other times, however, it might be more useful to assume there are many “Trollopes.” Trollope circulated widely, in serial and book form and also in such external contexts as the Tauchnitz editions of his novels, widely circulated in Europe and influential on, among others, Leo Tolstoy. This strengthens the sense of a bustling oeuvre at once coherent and diverse. But there is no case in which Trollope is simply repeating himself or doing hackwork. Every book of his attempts a situation, a perspective, or a plot development that the others have left unchronicled. Trollope had literary motivations over and above what he would defend as a legitimate pecuniary ambition for a professional writer. That Trollope wrote so much does not mean most of it is not good, and that there is not a reason for each book within the sweep of the entire oeuvre. Trollope’s body of work held together genre elements in the novel that later split apart. As Q.D. Lea- 3
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