Table Of ContentAnthony 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
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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
