Trollope

The bicentenaries of the great Victorian novelists are coming thick and fast. Dickens’ (born 1812) was celebrated with all due ceremony, but Thackeray’s (1811) passed with barely a whimper. How will Anthony Trollope fare in 2015? On the evidence of Michael Symmons Roberts’ analysis of what made him tick (23 January), full of dyed-in-the-wool Trollopeans avidly making their case, the schedules will be packed out with respectful commemoration. Indeed, Symmons Roberts, hard at work dramatising the Barchester novels for Radio 4, now has the 551 pages of Dr Thorne lying tantalisingly before him.

Like Thackeray, with his mad wife and lost patrimony, and Dickens, with his much-resented stint in the blacking factory, Trollope was a classic victim of the writer’s “wound”: in this case, the near-bankruptcy of his father. This compelled the seven-year-old Anthony to attend Harrow School as a charity boy while his mother, the redoubtable Mrs Fanny Trollope, author of Domestic Manners of the Americans, among much else, attempted to restore the family fortunes. There followed low-grade clerking work for the Post Office, and it was not until the 1850s, when he rose to the rank of surveyor and began work on the Barchester sequence, that his career began to take to off.

Symmons Roberts’ pursuit of his initially rather ramshackle hero (“an unengaging child”, remarked the Harrow archivist) ­followed two main routes. One was a series of dialogues with the author himself, justified by the entirely reasonable contention that his were the works of a “serial interrupter”. The other was a literal retracing of the paths Trollope had trod, and there was a particularly atmospheric dispatch filed from Drumsna, 80 miles west of Dublin, where Trollope had gone to investigate various postal irregularities. It was presented complete with reverential guides (“This is the actual staircase where he would have gone up to bed”) and colleens wailing mournfully in the background.

Ireland, according to Symmons Roberts, gave Trollope “a window into people’s secret lives”, not to mention the background to his first two novels and a meeting with the woman who became his wife. Subsequently the trail led on to Salisbury Cathedral (the setting for The Warden) and the City of London, where the novelist Alex Preston spoke illuminatingly about the grasp of ­financial chicanery that underlies Trollope’s great “state of the nation” panorama, The Way We Live Now (1875).

If Trollope had a weakness, it was one that the presenter cheerfully acknowledged: there was simply not enough time to squeeze in all the aspects of his subject’s life that begged for coverage. Nothing, for example, about the great political novels of the 1860s and 1870s, not a word about the obsession with hunting or the posthumous autobiography which, with its bread-and-butter account of his literary earnings, is supposed to have ruined his reputation for half a century. On the other hand, Symmons Roberts took his hero’s distinction for granted, and this, in a world where Trollope is often regarded as Dickens’ inferior cousin, is a very great deal.