George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 143  George & His Contemporaries: Anthony Trollope.

With images from Augustus Edwin Mulready (1844-1905).

George could have learnt a lot from reading a biography of Anthony Trollope (1815-1882). Born into a modest family but with financial 'expectations' (in the Dickens sense) to a mother who never bonded with him, and a father who was severe and aloof, young Anthony and an older brother were subjected to the humiliation of being sent to a public school as day-boys - the sorts of pupils who were obviously too poor to board/pay fees. They were also poorly dressed and wore shoddy shoes and both were ritually humiliated for it by their peers.

Flower Seller 1882

Mr Trollope Snr's expectations were eventually dashed and he had to carry on failing to make a living in Law. He did not do well, mainly because he was a truculent sort of cove who did not make enough contacts to earn a living at his calling. But Mrs Trollope – Fanny to her friends - was a woman in love with spending money; she sent Anthony and his brother to Winchester school, a prestigious establishment that routinely prepared young men for Oxford universities. Tom, the older of the Trollopes, was made a prefect. Encouraged by their mother to make himself responsible for Anthony’s behaviour, Tom applied daily thrashings and generally made his little brother’s life a misery, and Anthony never forgave him or their parents, for making his early years so unhappy.

Eventually, things deteriorated further. The family went to America to make money and poor Anthony was left behind alone in the UK, more or less to take care of himself. Disaster struck when his school fees were not paid and all credit in shops was stopped, leaving Anthony homeless during the holidays and all but destitute. In his autobiography, Anthony says he contemplated suicide as a way out of his dire situation. Anthony was removed from Winchester and returned to Harrow, where he was bullied once more, his studies suffered, and he became withdrawn and miserable. Fortunately, Fanny Trollope (one of the great names of Eng. Lit) managed to write some best-selling books and saved the day. However, much of that money she made was eaten up by creditors, and the Trollopes had to decamp to Belgium to escape them – after leaving Anthony alone in the UK once more.

Little Flower Sellers 1887

When he left school, Trollope was virtually uneducated, and academically unfit for most work – far too undeveloped for university. When he was 19, his mother found him a place in the Post Office, as a clerk. Initially, he was over-worked and well under-paid, like thousands of young men in similar positions. For example, William, George's brother, who worked in a Manchester bank, wrote in his letters that he worked sometimes 16-hour days and wasn't paid enough to keep himself in decent clothes and had to borrow from his mother - he earned about as much as Trollope, who once wrote how he found it difficult to '...live in London, keep up my character as a gentleman, and be happy, on £90 a year'. George was never, ever, that hard up, yet he harped on about his years of poverty haha. 

Anthony stayed with the Post Office for most of his working life, but he was lucky to find relief from the monotony by being appointed as Post Office Surveyor's clerk in Ireland, a job where he was able to mix office duties with official expeditions to places of natural beauty. He found a wife, settled to family life, and took up writing. He moved back to England, and it was when in Salisbury in Wiltshire that he found the inspiration for the first of what would become known as the Barchester novels. He maintained a gruelling daily round of being at his writing desk for 5.30am, stopped at 9.30, 2,500 words later, to take breakfast. He then travelled to London to do his day job, working at his Post Office desk from 11.30am-5pm, before setting off for an evening's socialising. Imagine George putting in that amount of effort! We know he resented working at proper jobs that took up his precious reading time, and even the few hours a day he did at teaching irked him beyond belief. 

A London Jo at The End of the Day 1884

Of the Salisbury visit, the source of the fictional Barchester, in 1852: '...wandering there one summer evening ... I conceived the story of The Warden' (the first Barchester novel) but later said it might have been based on any cathedral town like Hereford, Exeter, Gloucester or Canterbury. whatever the geographical source, these novels proved very popular, and moved Trollope into the main league of literary lions, though he never made a terrific fortune from his work. He kept up his Post Office work, so he was never financially hard up, but in an age when success was purely measured in monetary worth, it bothered him to know he was not as rich as Wilkie Collins, or Charles Dickens. He married and had two sons - the marriage was to last until his death, but he took up with a young woman, Kate Field, an American actress, journalist and pioneering feminist; it was a platonic friendship, conducted mainly by letter, Trollope's rival for Kate Field's affections was his literary rival, Wilkie Collins. To find out more about this fascinating woman, here is a free copy of a biography written in 1899 by one of her friends click. 

Uncared for 1871

Trollope is famed for his satirical stories critiquing society's ordinary people, whatever their class. 

Writing successful novels came a little too easy to him, and so he grew restless for more fame and renown. In 1867, he resigned from the Post Office after taking up the editorship of the monthly St Paul's Magazine, where he remained for 4 years. He made many short story contributions to the magazine, as did Fanny (who went on to write over 40 novels herself), but the magazine failed. Maybe the readership grew tired of all that work by the Trollopes? Undeterred, Anthony took up politics - the Liberal cause. It ended badly, of course.   

A London Newsboy c 1884

In 1875, Trollope wrote probably his most famous novel: 'The Way We Live Now'. Of which, he said:

Nevertheless a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write The Way We Live Now.

Listen to the novel here, as a free download click. And think of Dyce Lashmar (George's Our Friend the Charlatan).

Anthony Trollope is not widely read now, though, like George, he has his dedicated followers who guard their much-loved volumes like rare treasures. In the www world of quotes, here are a few of Trollope's which might have guided George through the choppy waters of his life's voyage. Some actually sound as if George had said them! From this site click

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.

Of all needs a book has, the chief need is to be readable.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

Little bits of things make me do it; — perhaps a word that I said and ought not to have said ten years ago; — the most ordinary little mistakes, even my own past thoughts to myself about the merest trifles. They are always making me shiver.

AND, FINALLY... George, summed up in a few words:

Throughout the world, the more wrong a man does, the more indignant is he at wrong done to him.