Fiction That Is True: Trollope and Politics

Abstract

Of all his literary creations, Trollope loved the Pallisers most. In his Autobiography (written mostly 1875–6; published posthumously 1883) he describes the string of characters who inhabit the Palliser novels as “the best I ever made” and the novels in which they appear as “the best work of my life” (p. 155). He always had a special tenderness for these novels. And it is true that they represent the peak of his achievement — his widest canvas, his broadest range, his surest touch. The Barset novels, entertaining as they are, lean heavily upon caricature and farce. As tragedy is of higher seriousness than comedy, so the Palliser novels rather than the novels of Barchester represent Trollope’s magnum opus.

That it is a good thing to be well off, that it is well to act honorably, that it is about the best of all things to be a well-to-do English gentlemen, and that it is quite the best of all things to be at once a well-to-do English gentleman and a master of fox-hounds, are the sort of maxims which Mr. Trollope directly or indirectly presents for the acceptance of his admirers. The creed he holds is the fact that the life of an English gentleman is the most satisfactory kind of life which any man can spend.

The Nation, 12 March 1874

‘I’m reading Trollope — the Palliser novels — and keep interrupting my wife to read her paragraphs that particularly strike me.’

Former Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, quoted in The New Yorker, 20 January 1975