December 6: On
this day in 1882 Anthony Trollope died. Inscribed upon Trollope's commemorative
plaque in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey is the last sentence from his Autobiography, published the year after
his death: "Now I stretch out my hand, and from the further shore I bid
adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words that I have
written." Those words amount to forty-seven novels, ten more than the
other literary giants of his time—Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brontës—combined.
And virtually all of them are currently in print, bought in unrivalled
quantities "not by students, forced to do so, but by people who read them
because they enjoy them," says biographer N. John Hall.
If Trollope is not on the university curriculum, he is
praised by those who are. "His great, his inestimable merit," said
Henry James, "was a complete appreciation of the usual." This is
Nathaniel Hawthorne, in a letter from 1860:
Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They
precisely suit my taste; solid, substantial, written on strength of beef and
through inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great
lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants
going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were made a show
of.
Some see Trollope's talent for the ordinary as his
limitation, making him no more than a "chronicler par excellence of storms
in teacups." The implied comparison is with Dickens, whether as writer,
social crusader, or large personality. Dickens would compose in a fever of
excitement, walking all night through the London streets in the grip of his
characters, places, and reform agenda. Trollope wrote every day starting at 5:30—typically
with his watch before him and a goal of 250 words every quarter-hour. He also
worked for the Post Office for thirty-three years; his unrealized, lifelong
aspiration was to be a member of the House of Commons, and his most concrete
social improvement was the invention of the red, street-corner letter-box.
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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