Anthony Trollope was the son of
barrister Thomas Anthony Trollope and the novelist and
travel writer Frances Milton Trollope. Though a clever and well-educated man and a Fellow of
New College, Oxford, Thomas Trollope failed at the Bar due to his bad temper. Ventures into farming proved unprofitable, and his expectations of inheritance were dashed when an elderly, childless uncle remarried and fathered children. Thomas Trollope was the son of the Rev. (Thomas) Anthony Trollope, rector of
Cottered, Hertfordshire, himself the sixth son of
Sir Thomas Trollope, 4th Baronet. The baronetcy later came to descendants of Anthony Trollope's second son, Frederic. As a son of
landed gentry, Thomas Trollope wanted his sons raised as gentlemen who would attend
Oxford or
Cambridge. Anthony suffered much misery in his boyhood, owing to the disparity between the privileged background of his parents and their comparatively meagre means. , Monken Hadley; home to Anthony and his mother 1836–38 Born in
Marylebone, Anthony Trollope attended
Harrow School as a
day pupil for three years, beginning at age seven, without paying fees because his father's farm, acquired for that purpose, lay in the neighbourhood. After a spell at a private school at
Sunbury, he followed his father and two older brothers to
Winchester College, where he remained for three years. He then returned to Harrow as a day-boy to reduce his education costs. With no money or friends at these two high-ranked elite
public schools, Trollope was bullied a great deal, enduring miserable experiences. At the age of 12, he fantasised about suicide. He also sought refuge in daydreams, constructing elaborate imaginary worlds. In 1827, his mother,
Frances Trollope, moved to America, to the
Nashoba Commune in
Tennessee, along with his three younger siblings. After that venture failed, she opened a bazaar in
Cincinnati, Ohio, which also failed. Thomas Trollope joined them for a short time before returning to the farm at Harrow, but Anthony stayed in England throughout. Anthony Trollope's mother returned in 1831 and rapidly made a name for herself as a writer, soon earning a good income. His father's affairs, however, went from bad to worse. He gave up his legal practice entirely and failed to make enough income from farming to pay rent to his landlord,
Lord Northwick. In 1834, he fled to
Belgium to avoid arrest for debt. The whole family moved to a house near
Bruges, where they lived entirely on Frances's earnings. In Belgium, Anthony Trollope was offered a commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment. To accept it, he needed to learn French and German; he had a year in which to do so. To acquire these languages without expense to himself and his family, he became an usher (assistant master) in a school in Brussels, making him the tutor of 30 boys. After six weeks there, however, he was offered a clerkship in the
General Post Office, obtained through a family friend. Accepting this post, he returned to London in the autumn of 1834. Thomas Trollope died the following year. According to Anthony Trollope, "the first seven years of my official life were neither creditable to myself nor useful to the public service." At the Post Office, he acquired a reputation for unpunctuality and insubordination. A debt of £12 to a tailor fell into the hands of a moneylender and grew to more than £200; the lender regularly visited Trollope at his workplace to demand payments. Trollope hated his job, but he saw no alternative to it and lived in constant fear of dismissal. A postal surveyor clerk in central
Ireland, reported as incompetent, needed replacement. The position was not regarded as desirable, but Trollope, in debt and in trouble at work, volunteered for it; and his supervisor,
William Maberly, a
Whig politician eager to be rid of him, appointed him to the position. His salary and travel allowance went much further in Ireland than they had in
London, and he found himself enjoying a measure of prosperity. Their first son, Henry Merivale, was born in 1846, and their second, Frederick James Anthony, in 1847.
Early works Though Trollope had decided to become a novelist, he had accomplished very little writing during his first three years in Ireland. At the time of his marriage, he had written only the first of three volumes of his first novel,
The Macdermots of Ballycloran. Within a year of his marriage, he finished that work. Trollope began writing on the numerous long train trips around Ireland he had to take to carry out his postal duties. Setting firm goals about how much he would write each day, he eventually became one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote his earliest novels while working as a Post Office inspector, occasionally dipping into the "
lost-letter" box for ideas. , where Trollope maintained his office as Postal Surveyor for the northern half of Ireland Significantly, many of his earliest novels have Ireland as their setting—natural enough given that he wrote them or thought them up while he was living and working in Ireland, but unlikely to enjoy warm critical reception, given the contemporary English attitude towards Ireland. Critics have pointed out that Trollope's view of Ireland separates him from many of the other Victorian novelists. Other critics claimed that Ireland did not influence Trollope as much as his experience in England, and that the society in Ireland harmed him as a writer, especially since Ireland was experiencing the
Great Famine during his time there. However, these critics (who have been accused of bigoted opinions against Ireland) failed or refused to acknowledge both Trollope's true attachment to the country and the country's capacity as a rich literary field. Trollope published four novels about Ireland. Two were written during the Great Famine, while the third deals with the famine as a theme (
The Macdermots of Ballycloran, ''
The Kellys and the O'Kellys, and Castle Richmond, respectively). The Macdermots of Ballycloran
was written while he was staying in the village of Drumsna, County Leitrim. The Kellys and the O'Kellys'' (1848) is a humorous comparison of the romantic pursuits of the landed gentry (Francis O'Kelly, Lord Ballindine) and his Catholic tenant (Martin Kelly). Two short stories deal with Ireland ("The O'Conors of Castle Conor, County Mayo" and "Father Giles of Ballymoy"). Some critics argue that these works seek to unify an Irish and British identity, instead of viewing the two as distinct. Even as an Englishman in Ireland, Trollope was still able to attain what he saw as essential to being an "Irish writer": being possessed, obsessed, and "mauled" by Ireland. The reception of the Irish works left much to be desired.
Henry Colburn wrote to Trollope, "It is evident that readers do not like novels on Irish subjects as well as on others."
Success as an author In 1851, Trollope was sent to England, charged with investigating and reorganising rural mail delivery in southwestern England and south
Wales. The two-year mission took him over much of Great Britain, often on horseback. Trollope describes the time as being "two of the happiest years of my life". In the course of it, he visited
Salisbury Cathedral; and there, according to his autobiography, he conceived the plot of
The Warden, which became the first of the six
Barsetshire novels. His postal work delayed the beginning of writing for a year; the novel was published in 1855, in an edition of 1,000 copies, with Trollope receiving half of the profits: £9 8s. 8d. in 1855 (about £ in consumer pounds), and £10 15s. 1d. in 1856 (about £ in consumer pounds). Although the profits were not large, the book received notices in the press and brought Trollope to the attention of the novel-reading public. upon its publication in 1857, he received an advance payment of £100 (about £ in consumer pounds) against his share of the profits. Like
The Warden,
Barchester Towers did not obtain large sales, but it helped to establish Trollope's reputation. In his autobiography, Trollope writes, "It achieved no great reputation, but it was one of the novels which novel readers were called upon to read." Later that year, he moved to
Waltham Cross, about from London in Hertfordshire, where he lived until 1871. In late 1859, Trollope learned of preparations for the release of the
Cornhill Magazine, to be published by
George Murray Smith and edited by
William Makepeace Thackeray. He wrote to the latter, offering to provide short stories for the new magazine. Thackeray and Smith both responded: the former urging Trollope to contribute, the latter offering £1,000 (about £ in consumer pounds) for a novel, provided that a substantial part of it could be available to the printer within six weeks. Trollope offered Smith
Castle Richmond, which he was then writing; but Smith declined to accept an Irish story, and suggested a novel dealing with English clerical life as had
Barchester Towers. Trollope then devised the plot of
Framley Parsonage, setting it near Barchester so that he could make use of characters from the Barsetshire novels.
Framley Parsonage proved enormously popular, establishing Trollope's reputation with the novel-reading public and amply justifying the high price that Smith had paid for it. The early connection to
Cornhill also brought Trollope into the London circle of artists, writers, and intellectuals, not least among whom were Smith and Thackeray. By the mid-1860s, Trollope had reached a fairly senior position within the Post Office hierarchy, despite differences with
Rowland Hill, who was at that time Chief Secretary to the
Postmaster General. When Hill left the Post Office in 1864, Trollope's brother-in-law,
John Tilley, who was then Under-Secretary to the Postmaster General, was appointed to the vacant position. Trollope applied for Tilley's old post but was passed over in favour of a subordinate,
Frank Ives Scudamore. In the autumn of 1867, Trollope resigned his position at the Post Office, having by that time saved enough to generate an income equal to the pension he would lose by leaving before the age of 60. in
Vanity Fair, 1873
Beverley campaign Trollope had long dreamt of taking a seat in the
House of Commons. As a civil servant, however, he was ineligible for such a position. His resignation from the Post Office removed this disability, and he almost immediately began seeking a seat for which he might stand. In 1868, he agreed to stand as a
Liberal candidate in the
borough of
Beverley, in the
East Riding of Yorkshire. Party leaders apparently took advantage of Trollope's eagerness to stand and of his willingness to spend money on a campaign. The task of a Liberal candidate was not to win the election but to give the
Conservative candidates an opportunity to display overt corruption, which could then be used to disqualify them. and a
Royal Commission investigated the circumstances of the election; its findings of extensive and widespread corruption drew nationwide attention, and led to the disfranchisement of the borough in 1870. Trollope wrote a travel book focusing on his experiences in the US during the
American Civil War titled
North America (1862). Aware that his mother had published a very unsympathetic travel book about the U.S. (
Domestic Manners of the Americans) and having markedly better feelings about the United States, Trollope resolved to write a work that would "add to the good feeling which should exist between two nations which ought to love each other." During his time in America, Trollope, a committed
abolitionist who opposed
slavery in the
South, remained a steadfast supporter of the
Union. In 1871, Trollope made his first trip to
Australia, arriving in
Melbourne on 28 July 1871 on the
SS Great Britain, with his wife and their cook. The trip was made to visit their younger son, Frederick, who was a sheep farmer near
Grenfell, New South Wales. He wrote his novel
Lady Anna during the voyage. He visited the penal colony of
Port Arthur and its cemetery,
Isle of the Dead. Despite that, the Australian press was uneasy, fearing he would misrepresent Australia in his writings. Their fear was based on rather negative writings about America by his mother, Fanny, and by
Charles Dickens. On his return, Trollope published a book,
Australia and New Zealand (1873). It contained both positive and negative comments. On the positive side, it found a comparative absence of class consciousness and praised aspects of
Perth, Melbourne,
Hobart and
Sydney. In the late 1870s, Trollope furthered his travel writing career by visiting
southern Africa, including the
Cape Colony and the
Boer Republics of the
Orange Free State and the
Transvaal. Admitting that he initially assumed that the
Afrikaners had "retrograded from civilization, and had become savage, barbarous, and unkindly", Trollope wrote at length on Boer cultural habits, claiming that the "roughness ...
Spartan simplicity and the dirtiness of the Boer's way of life [merely] resulted from his preference for living in rural isolation, far from any town." In the completed work, which Trollope simply titled
South Africa (1877), he described the
mining town of
Kimberly as being "one of the most interesting places on the face of the earth." == Hunting ==