On Reading Trollope
There was a moment when I read through Trollope’s Palliser series, one novel after the other, fairly quickly. I enjoyed it, and it produced a quite curious result. Towards the end of this process—so it must have been while reading The Duke’s Children—it occurred to me that I loved Anthony Trollope.
It sounds bizarre, or even twisted, when set down coldly like that, but it was spontaneous and real. I wanted to be able to sit down with him, speak with him about these ... people (much more than “characters”!) that we knew in common. This impulse simply to be with him, as someone I had grown to love, sprang unbidden. Truth be told, it felt odd, but nonetheless present for that.
It probably wouldn’t have worked out.
For this insight, I have William Dean Howells to thank. As a young man, Howells was on a visit to England and hoped to connect with Trollope, facilitated by certain letters of introduction. Trollope replied (on 13 July, 1865 — and coincidentally, this blog post is being written on 13 July!), inviting Howells for a weekend visit. Howells went,
but [Trollope] scarcely spoke to him while he was there; and he offered him none of the hoped-for help, or advice, as to English publishers, that the young American was too proud to mention.1
Thirty years later, Howells still ranked Trollope as preeminent among English novelists (ahead even of Jane Austen),2 “an author who was undoubtedly one of the finest of artists as well as the most Philistine of men.”
So ... likely it’s just as well that my oddly inspired affection for the great novelist did not (could not) meet with the same rude awakening that Howells experienced.