Reading Trollope Today

This article discusses Trollope's extraordinary reliance on "but" and other adversatives locutions as the stylistic correlative to Victorian tact, a reconciliation between friction and ease. For Trollope, tact accommodates the tension between, on the one hand, an epistemological investment in skepticism and an aesthetic investment in dissembling, discordant characters and, on the other hand, a residual notion of moral character that was reluctant to "give the lie," to doubt a gentleman. Trollope's style inscribes these competing models of character into everyday language, revealing the moral dynamics of quotidian reality.

Victorian Review, 2005

Joanna Trollope, a distant relative of the nineteenth century novelist Anthony Trollope, has to date written nine historical novels, three romantic period sagas (writing under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey), a study of women in the British Empire - Britannia's Daughters - an anthology of writing about the countryside (The Country Habi) and five contemporary novels, written under her own name. All of these contemporary novels appear to have been very successful, running into several reprints in the paperback editions, while three of them have been adapted for television - The Rector's Wife, The Choir, and A Village Affair. In commercial terms, therefore, it is safe to state that Trollope is a successful modern novelist. This paper attempts to account for this success - especially in the contemporary novels - by arguing that Trollope appeals to a peculiarly English passion; the passion for 'the heart of England', which is not only perceived in terms of geography, but is also a state of mind. The novelist and gardener Vita Sackville West wrote in 1926 that: “The country habit has me by the heart.” I t is this 'habit' which is evoked in Trollope's novels, which can be defined both in terms of nationalism, and the love of landscape, which persists even when the reality of the dream turns out to be inconvenient, lonely and deep in mud.

Points to writer/reporter Frank Lawley as a possible model for the young Lord Silverbridge (Trollope, The Duke's Children).

Cambridge University Press, 2018

The book’s introduction provides a capsule history of working-class social movements from the 1830s to the 1850s, a period Thomas Carlyle referred to as “our French Revolution.” These years saw the mass mobilization of working-class people in Britain around an array of issues, including factory reform, a free press, a broadened franchise, and the maintenance of the poor laws. These agitations coalesced in Chartism, which sought the expansion of democratic rights as a way to redress social and economic wrongs. But Chartism was never exclusively focused on political reform; it was also a cultural force which nourished an array of artistic, educational, and literary activity. In the introduction, I analyze the treatment of middle-class social problem fiction in the literature column of the Northern Star, the preeminent radical publication of the late 1830s and 1840s. Even as Carlyle and others characterized the working classes as essentially mute, this radical publication actively engaged with the work of Jerrold, Gaskell, Disraeli, Dickens, Frances Trollope and Carlyle himself. At times, the Star sought to conscript middle-class novelists’ prestige into the Chartist program for reform, enlisting them, if unwillingly, as fellow travelers on the march towards democracy. The introduction concludes with an examination of the way Frances Trollope’s encounters with working-class radicals in the Manchester region informed her early industrial novels, which helped establish the genre of “Condition of England” fiction.

During the 1700s, the English middle class secured economic and political dominance and began bidding for cultural dominance, evolving an ethic of gentility and an aesthetic of ‘naturalness.’ The “record of this process,” argues Nancy Armstrong, is “available in paperback. We call it fiction.” Lamenting that “nothing was well hung in [his] family,” Laurence Sterne’s Tristram interweaves “sense” and “nonsense,” person and text, to fabricate gentility. His character is inextricable from the very text that frets his genteel status with anxiety, tinging it with an eroticism at once veiled and omnipresent. The early 1700s defined a gentleman as “partaking in universal conversation”: “nobody in particular” and thus “an acceptable representative for everybody.” Disseminating this model, Daniel Defoe published The Compleat English Gentleman, and Joseph Addison wrote as Mr. Spectator, who lives “in the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species,” ostensibly discerning “Errors in the Oeconomy, Business, and Diversion of others, better than those [. . .] engaged in them.” From such treatises, two related discourses emerged in the mid 1700s. First, narrative fictions multiplied the gentleman, distinctively middle-class by contrast to both profligate aristocrat and unsophisticated peasant, naturalizing this figure by asserting its “pre-existence in the natural order.” Second, writers distinguished the novel by contrast to tragedy, romance, and comic-burlesque. Prominent in both discourses: Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Fielding grants the gentleman fallibility, redeeming his status by sensibility, especially by contrast to a villain who pretends to the gentility delineated by Addison and Defoe. Sterne mocks the stiff formalism of that conception and, like Fielding, grounds the genteel instead in sensibility. And both promote the genre they are fabricating—the novel—in terms very like those with which they define the gentleman.

Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2006

Once regarded as a minor Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope has in recent decades become a focus of significant attention. Trollope's enhanced profile in the field of Victorian studies has doubtless much to do with the interest in liberalism after more than twenty years of neo-liberal economic and cultural ascendancy. Yet while Trollope's reputation as the novelist par excellence of Victorian liberalism is relevant to the papers collected here, their special motive is to explore his distinctiveness as a practitioner of form. This introduction provides contexts for the three papers that follow, exploring the premise that Trollope's formal innovativeness has been too long overlooked.