Like many of my generation, I first encountered Trollope during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945 I bought and read about twenty-five volumes in either the little Oxford World Classics or Dent’s slightly bigger Everyman edition. They cost about three shillings each and have survived fifty years very well. Then, unconsciously following fashion, I never read another word of Trollope for a quarter of a century. The news that Harold Macmillan had found him as addictive during government crises as Asquith had found letter-writing to ladies of fashion did nothing to stir me to emulation. In the 1970s, however, long after Macmillan’s reading patterns had ceased to preoccupy gossip writers, I suddenly took Trollope up again and plunged deep into the Barchester series, leavened with Can You Forgive Her? and The Duke’s Children from the political novels.
In 1988 the invitation to write this introduction sent me back to a leisurely reading of the latter. I then made the mistake of postponing the execution of the writing task. This made me feel that I had to go back for yet a fourth time, although on this occasion reading quickly and under pressure. So this work is in the position, perhaps unique to a book not my own (in these frequency is dictated by the need for revision and proof-reading as well as by narcissism), of having been read four times. Even so, I found on the last go that the difficulty was not, as is often the case, that skimming led to aquaplaning so that I was soon hardly touching the surface, but that I could not bring myself to strike with sufficient ruthlessness from headland to headland but still wanted to re-explore, for the second time within little more than a year, every inlet of the convoluted coast.
What gives Trollope this strong if fluctuating attraction for me? Is it, as his detractors would have it, the comfortingly reliable pull of the second-rate? I do not think so. He was certainly not consistent, except in his output per hour. His quality varied enormously, both between books and within them, and the variation was accompanied by a remarkable lack of discrimination as a self-critic. He could write a novel as bad as The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson and one as good as Phineas Finn: The Irish Member within a year of each other, and not be aware of the difference in quality between them.
Nor was he nearly as pedestrianly plodding as his critics and sometimes he himself liked to pretend. He was prolix, partly because it was the fashion and partly because he was over-fluent, but in his better books, a few descriptive passages apart, he carried the reader over the ground with an easy momentum which belied his heavy frame and explained why he was so at home in the hunting field. His dialogue was always sure-footed.
This, however, is to some extent a defensive tribute, a refutation of those like Henry James who thought that Trollope was essentially a novelist for the unsubtle, even the stupid, in today’s parlance a sort of chronicler for the saloon bar or the golf clubhouse. His positive strength for me lies principally in his command over both the physical and the social topography of mid-Victorian England. Some of his work is like that Canaletto picture of Whitehall in which the detail was so accurate that, nearly two hundred years after it had been painted, the Westminster City Council find it a useful chart for drainage repairs.
There never has been a writer who, thanks to his work as a postal surveyor, knew the geography of England (and Ireland) so well. And over it, with almost unparalleled logistic skill, he could marshal an army of characters. They may turn out to be a stage army that comes round and round for the second, third and fourth times, but we are always glad to see again.
His fictional imagination was not, however, bounded by his previous knowledge. He had great capacity to familiarize himself, as it were by order, with worlds he did not previously know but wished to write about. When he had already published The Warden and was deep in Barchester Towers he recorded: ‘I never lived in any cathedral city - except London,1 never knew anything of any close, never had any peculiar intimacy with any clergymen, and had not then even spoken to an archdeacon.’ But Trollope liked to make throwaway remarks about his own work, although not to sell it at throwaway prices. I wonder how seriously we should take such self-deprecation as: ‘When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it will end.’? His journeyman’s approach to writing, pretending it was no different from cobbling, was I suspect more designed to prick the illusions of uncomprehending interlocutors than to analyse his own methods and skills.
He was full of paradoxes: a man of boisterous, some said rather boorish, manners who loved social life, and who could write with delicacy about it and about more intimate human relations; a man who could satirize politics and politicians, but who regarded being a member of the British Parliament as the greatest honour that could possibly befall a man, and who in 1868 tried hard but unsuccessfully at Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire to get himself elected on a Liberal ticket.