Anthony Trollope Books

Trollope covers broad range of life in this wonderfully amusing tale of three very diverse clerks and the career paths they take in Victorian England. He depicts them with depth and sympathy and you can't help feeling sorry for the plights their own follies bring upon them. Trollope knew the life he wrote about from his own eventful and long remembered career as a postal worker! Romance and vivid scene painting combine with social comentary to make Three Clerks a classic worth reading for pleasure as well as for the cultural history education it offers.

I've been reading Trollope's works, and coming across the Three Clerks, thought it might be as interesting and as exciting as the novels I had already read. Not so. Generally, Trollope takes his time at the beginning of his books, setting up characters, situations, locations -- so for about one hundred pages or less, you have a rather slow-paced, dull introduction. Then the suspense tends to emerge and the books become difficult to put down until the very satisfying (in most cases) ending. However, The Three Clerks lacks suspense. Partly, this is due to Trollope's negligence in fleshing out his characters; otherwise, it is the result of concentrating on his exposition on the civil service and less on his characters and their private situations. The book becomes Dickensian in some respects, and Dickens isn't exactly known for clarity or excitement. There being no suspense about the characters, and in fact no great interest in any of them, the book is more of an endurance test to read than a pleasure.

One problem could be that Trollope tries to handle too many characters. The Three Clerks of the title are Harry Norman, his best friend and eventually worst enemy Alaric Tudor (who steals his promotion and then his lady-love), and Alaric's cousin, the dissipated and indebted Charley Tudor. Of these young men, Harry Norman in his innocence, having much to learn about the ways of men, women and the world, would have been the most interesting to pursue, but Trollope concentrates on Alaric and his ambitions which eventually get him into a courtroom and jail -- though with a surprisingly light sentence for a man who swindles a client's fortune. The young men are matched to three young women, the Woodward sisters. Gertrude, the eldest, is cold-hearted and ambitious, and though Harry Norman loves her greatly, makes a heartless but intellectual decision to unite herself with Alaric, whose ambition she admires. She pays the price for this, but she does so in the typical female role, always viewing her husband as something near to a god, never blaming him for his failings and his crimes, and standing by her man through the trials that will follow for her and her children. Gertrude, like Alaric, gets her comeuppance, but she is also symbolic of the dependent woman of her time and often of our times, sticking to a man through all insult because the world has convinced her that not only can she not stand on her own, but she deserves no better than to be the support of a man whose ethics and behaviors are questionable. Linda, Gertrude's younger sister, who is loved and romanced but then dumped by Alaric, who cold-heartedly and ambitiously wants the oldest daughter rather than the one he professes to love, is like Harry Norman an interesting character who should have been explored but who gets little mention in the pages of the book. She is superceded by her baby sister, Katie, who falls for the useless rogue Charley and thus falls into an hysterical wasting-away that is so annoying that you almost wish . . . Well, never mind what you wish, but all six of these characters are dissatisfying and foolish, victims of their era and their stations in life. Add to that, we have Mrs. Woodward, mother to the three women, who is very nice but ineffectual and though having the opportunity to succeed, succumbs to being helpless without a man to take care of her. She is of no benefit to her daughters and actually far too negligent in her mothering of them, leading to the disasters and potential disasters in the book. Lesser characters include Undecimus Scott, the villian who leads Alaric astray, who is not as evil as he is expected to be but merely manipulative and conniving, essentially a bore. There is also Uncle Bat, a retired sea captain who makes a home with the Woodwards and generally drinks himself into a stupor. Or members of the civil service who both support or compete with Harry and Alaric in their rise in their careers. Everything ends well for Harry, at least, and Linda -- two good people get their just reward. Charley Tudor turns into a Trollope himself, writing stories for the literary magazines of his day, although the author reproduces his stories within the context of the book, which introduces just another method of dulling the pace and the action of the novel itself. Plenty of pages here to skim or skip, the book could have been half the size but still have retained the essence of the story -- on the other hand, if the author had only developed his characters and followed the important ones more closely, we could have had a finer novel of psychological and moral import.

Rachel Ray is (IMHO) the least of Trollope's longer works. Set in a pleasant country town, with a terribly pleasant cast of characters, the novel is, well, ..... pleasant .... without ever offering anything more for the reader. I suppose there are some who would say that Trollope's genius was to write a work that was as pleasant as its setting, but after seeing how good he is at social novels (e.g., The American Senator, The Way We Live Now) and more excitingly peopled romances (e.g., The Claverings) this book was, for me at least, a real let-down. The plot involves a young girl who is certain of the affections of her suitor even when (highly contrived) circumstances make it appear to all around her that he is, in fact, a jilt. Don't read this next sentence if you plan on reading the book: Surprise! Little Rachel was right all along and her lover in fact marries her. *YAWN!*

Along the way, there are a lot of fairly typical Trollopian subplots dealing with country families putting on town airs, modernization of the brewing industry, and other fun stuff that does illuminate nineteenth-century country life for the twenty-first-century reader. But none of it is particularly compelling, at least not for me.

Bottom line: I adore Trollope and have read most of his output, but if I were to rank his works Rachel Ray would be near, or even at, the bottom.

One must make allowences for the occasional sloppiness of Trollope's writing, given the serialized format and the incredible number of novels he wrote while working full-time for the post office. He always has something important to say and usually says it well. This novel is one of his shortest and one of his best. Like George Elliot and Charles Dickens, Trollope was dragged kicking and screaming into industrialized England in the 19th century. And, like them, he saw beneath the glitz and glamor of new-found wealth and the breakdown in social classes that followed the Reform movement in England. He seems at times to be overly preoccupied with the demise of the "lady" and the "gentleman," but this concern reveals a well-founded alarm over the vanishing of such Victorian values as "nobility" and "duty to others." In this novel he expresses many of those concerns while targetting the Evangelicals, an attack that is right-on and timely indeed. He reveals the hypocrisy of so many of those who are filled with resentment and hatred of their fellow humans while professing to bask in the love of Christ.
I would rate this novel, alongside The Warden, as first-rate and excellent ways to come to Anthony Trollope, who is, in my view, a vastly under-rated writer, despite his flaws.

I READ THIS AS A SHORT STORY IN A LARGER COLLECTION. IT IS TYPICAL OF ALL TROLLOPE SHORT TALES - IT HAS A PLOT, MUCH CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT, MUCH PHILOSOPHY ABOUT LOVE AND LIFE, AND HAS A MEANINGFUL CONCLUSION. TOO MANY SHORT STORIES JUST SEEM TO BE MOOD PIECES AND WANDER. NOT TROLLOPE! THIS STORY CONCERNS THE LOVE BETWEEN A MAN AND WOMAN AND HOW OTHER FACTORS - FAMILY AND SOCIETAL NEEDS AND MORES - EXERT AN INFLUENCE - USUALLY DETRIMENTAL. HOWEVER, IN THE END, TRUE LOVE IS ALL THAT MATTERS, NOT WHAT OTHERS THINK, THE FAMILIES DESIRE, OR SOCIETY DICTATES. IF YOU LOVE TROLLOPE, READ ALICE DUGDALE.

Miller's famous 1989 study of the Victorian novel through the lens of Foucauldian ideas about surveillance and sexuality is one of the most brilliant studies in the field--its readings of Collins, Trollope, and Dickens have become definitive. The work suffers only from its author's vanity: the references to his personal life seem cutesy and don't add much to the study (they detract from it). Otherwise this is the best study of the Victorian novel in decades.

John Caldigate is a somewhat weak-willed man where women are concerned, as well as where gambling occurs, so he has managed to bankrupt himself as well as get himself "engaged" to several women through the course of the book, all because he can't say No when he should. Women cause him the greater trouble, but when he eventually returns home to England as a wealthy man (hard work was what made him so) and marries the woman he truly loves, his greatest troubles are now with business associates from his past and his wife's relations. What poses a disaster for himself and his wife (mother of his infant son) is a relationship he had with a "fast" woman, an actress, while he was making his fortune in Australia. She shows up in England, wanting money, and claims that she is actually John's wife. Thus John's marriage is bigamous, his son illegitmate, and his wife downfallen. The extent to which her family interferes, even to kidnapping the wife, is outrageous and dramatic. In fact, most of this book is high drama. It is very entertaining, and it resolves itself nicely, although all John's former "fiancees" do spend much time being thankful that they never married him. There is humor here, and there is tension. A very good read.

Trollope wrote this very short novel (only about 45,000 words) for the Christmas issue of a London magazine. Regarding Victorian sentimentality about the holiday as "humbug", he presented a very different sort of Yuletide tale, one in which there are no snow flakes and no sleigh bells - and in which fires are not cozy but frightening.

The hero is a prosperous young sheep rancher in Queensland, where December is the hottest, driest month of the year, when a careless match can spark a ruinous blaze and in a few hours wipe out all that a man has built through years of labor.

Careless matches are not the only danger. Harry has just as much fear of malicious ones. He is an imperious ruler of his domain (120,000 acres leased from the Crown) and prides himself on his unflinching candor. Not surprisingly, he is at feud with his shiftless, thieving neighbors, the Brownbie clan, and is quite willing to quarrel with Giles Medlicot, another neighbor, when Medlicot hires on a hand whom Harry has dismissed for insubordination and suspects of plotting arson.

In other Trollope novels, "war to the knife" means snubbing an enemy in the street or not inviting him to a garden party. In this one, conflict is simpler and more violent. With the grass growing more parched by the hour, Harry's enemies gather, scheme and strike. Because Trollope is not a tragedian, they are thwarted - narrowly - and there is even a Christmas dinner to conclude the story and incidentally seal a budding romance. But the pacing and atmosphere are very different from the Trollope that readers expect.

The picture of a frontier society, living almost in a Hobbesian "state of nature", is vivid, and the moral consequences of that state are clearly drawn. Harry's refusal to compromise with what he believes to be wrong is a principle that can be safely followed only where the structures of law and order offer shelter. Where a man must be his own constable, high principle is a dangerous luxury. The appearance of two colonial policemen at the end, as helpless to punish the malefactors as they were to forestall them, underlines the impotence of the law and perhaps reminded Trollope's audience of the excellence of their own social arrangements.

Alert members of that audience will perhaps have noticed that Queensland displays ironic inversions of English certitudes. Most notably, Harry leases his land and _therefore_ considers himself socially much above Medlicot, who has purchased his. In the home country, of course, a land owner who farmed his property (Medlicot is a sugar grower) would have looked severely down upon a man who kept livestock on rented pastures.

Unfortunately, despite its excellent qualities, "Harry Heathcote" suffers a defect that reduces it to the Trollopian second class (albeit that is no low place to be). In so short a work, nothing should be wasted, and too many words are wasted here on a perfunctory romance, one of the least interesting that Trollope ever devised. Medlicot's courtship of Harry's sister-in-law not only adds nothing to the narrative but is positively detrimental, as it gives the neighbor a self-interested motive for his decision to take Harry's side against the Brownbie conspiracy rather than maintain a "fair-minded" neutrality.

Anyone who has never read Trollope should not begin here, but the author's fans will not regret passing a few hours with him in the Australian bush.

Anthony Trollope is an English writer of the Victorian period most well-known for his unbelievably prolific fiction. So both the reader of Victorian literature and also the classicist may be somewhat surprised to find here a passionate defense of the 1st-century BC orator and statesman Cicero. This is all the more surprising because Trollope wrote at a time when Cicero was under attack, especially from German classicists. In these two volumes, however, Trollope discusses Cicero's speeches, compares Cicero's life to that of contemporary Romans, and decides that Cicero was a great man and a patriot whose reputation should be defended. Although Trollope may be a little over-lenient regarding the orator's famous pride and bombast, his glowing assessment is (ironically) closer to some modern views than that of his contemporaries who lambasted Cicero from their positions as professional classicists. I heartily recommend the set to Trollope enthusiasts and to Cicero partisans, but the average reader of Victorian literature may find the classical dicussions uninteresting, while the average classicist may not be satisfied with Trollope's non-scholarly approach.

Anthony Trollope's first novel, and a good one. Set in Ireland in the 1830s, it tells the story of a proud but destitute family and their tragic downfall at the hands of a scoundrel. Myles Ussher is an English police captain sent to Ireland to help stop illegal whiskey making. Feemy Macdermot falls deeply in love with him, though he has no intention of returning that love. The locals hate him, and Feemy's brother Thady, when he learns of Ussher's merely using Feemy, kills him in a rage when he believes Ussher is abducting her against her will (they are actually eloping). A trial ensues and after some exciting intervals involving escapes, Thady is convicted and hanged.

Trollope offers a sympathetic look at Ireland's troubles during this time period; indeed the "innocent" Feemy might symbolically represent that country while the unfeeling, spiteful Ussher is England. Trollope had spent a good deal of time in Ireland and knew the country and the people well; his use of Irish dialogue is natural and realistic. The trial scene is pretty exciting, and Trollope's broad humor is already clearly evident. The use of the dilapidated Macdermot mansion as the starting and ending point, with the main plot sandwiched inbetween as flashback, gives the novel a cinematic touch. The author would achieve greater novels as his career progressed, but this initial production highlights an auspicious start.

In 1867, at a time when he was one of the best known and best selling authors in the world, Anthony Trollope conceived the idea of experimenting with anonymous publication, in order to find out whether the multitude bought his books for their literary excellence or merely for the "brand name" on the cover. Two relatively short novels, "Nina Balatka" and "Linda Tressel", were the result. Taken together, they offer a glimpse of a different Trollope from the familiar chronicler of politicians and parsons.

The two stories have much in common. Each is set in a foreign city that Trollope had recently visited ("Nina" in Prague, "Linda" in Nuremberg), with a plot centered on the impact of an aunt's religious bigotry on a young woman's marital prospects. In one, the zealous aunt is Roman Catholic and opposes her niece's betrothal to a wealthy Jew. In the other, an Anabaptist aunt strives to promote a union between beautiful, wealthy Linda Tressel and a clownish, middle-aged bureaucrat.

"Nina" is the better realized of the two tales. Troubling the course of true love are both the antisemitism of the Balatka family and the countervailing suspicions of the Jewish community, forces that work to drive the lovers apart. Some of the machinations are clumsy, but character is, as usual, more important than incident in Trollope. The portrayal of the mutually hostile religious communities is especially effective, showing a broad range of attitudes in each camp. Nina and her fiancé are themselves complicated figures, for it takes a long time for their love to completely overcome prejudices instilled from childhood.

"Linda", by contrast, suffers from dramatis personae who are mostly caricatures, out of place in a serious, even grim, story. The religious motif verges on the absurd. There are reasons why a 19th century Catholic family would revolt against a relative's marriage to a Jew. There are none to move an Anabaptist to insist on linking her nearest kinswoman to a worldly boor. Indeed, the author does not have much notion of what "Anabaptists" are. (He seems to regard them as a species of Calvinist, which is about like labeling Ross Perot a "Republican".) Religious bigotry detached from any recognizable religion can evoke only laughter, which is not the response that "Linda Tressel" is supposed to arouse.

Trollope's experiment did not turn out particularly well. The mildly unusual settings and themes of these works could not hide his identity from alert critics, several of whom quickly pierced the veil of anonymity. On the other hand, readers were fooled and declined to buy, even though the reviews were generally positive. "Another ten years of unpaid unflagging labor might have built up a second reputation," Trollope wrote in his autobiography, but "I could not at once induce English readers to read what I gave to them, unless I gave it with my name." That is what he did thereafter, bringing the career of the "alternative Trollope" to an end.

"Nina Balatka" and its companion novel "Linda Tressel" represent the oddest experiment of Anthony Trollope's literary career. Long established as a leading novelist, he published these two tales anonymously, wishing to see whether, starting without the support of his fame, he could create "a second literary identity". Reviews were favorable, but sales meager. "Another ten years of unpaid unflagging labor might have built up a second reputation," Trollope wrote in his autobiography, but "I could not at once induce English readers to read what I gave to them, unless I gave it with my name."

So the trial was abandoned, leaving behind two Trollopian novels with an exotic flavor. Both are set in foreign, non-English speaking lands, and, while both deal with romance and religion - themes certainly not foreign to the author - they do so in untypical ways.

"Nina Balatka" takes place in Prague, which Trollope had recently visited. There a gloomy imperial court (of Ex-Emperor Ferdinand, who had abdicated the Austrian throne after the revolution of 1848) presided over an almost medieval city, where the Jewish population, though possessing some degree of civic rights, still lived in a ghetto, and an unenlightened Christianity was a powerful social force.

The story that Trollope sets here, of the family-crossed romance between a young Catholic woman and a somewhat older Jewish merchant, seems far less daring and unconventional now than it did in 1867. The plot, too, is creaky, its mainspring a business about title deeds whose significance is obscure to the reader (and most likely to the author also).

Meticulous plotting and close fidelity to legal niceties are not, however, the virtues that one seeks in Trollope. His strengths lie in the portrayal of manners, emotions and character. In those respects, "Nina Balatka" is worthy of its author. It is also a testament to the power of his imagination. A single visit to Prague was scarcely sufficient to make him expert in the customs of the city's Catholics and Jews. There are glaring improbabilities, chief among them that Anton, the eldest son of a wealthy father in a traditional Jewish community, should have reached his middle thirties as a bachelor. Nevertheless, this largely fanciful society coheres in the reader's mind and seems almost as believable as Barsetshire or Gatherum Castle.

Readers of Trollope, after they have devoured his famous works, tend to become voracious. This flawed but moving novel, though not a gourmet dish, will satisfactorily allay their appetites.