The Chaos of Criticism

Abstract

I know nothing in literary history to match the divided opinion on Trollope’s novels. Such disputes do not occur over Dickens or Thackeray or George Eliot or Meredith. Nobody, I think, considers Martin Chuzzlewit Dickens’s best novel, or Philip Thackeray’s best, or Daniel Deronda George Eliot’s best, or One of Our Conquerors Meredith’s best. Yet among Trollope’s forty-seven novels there are only a handful that someone has not called his best. One might assume from this fact that the level of Trollope’s work is remarkably steady. Having found a theme, a manner, and a tone, he was able to repeat his formula so successfully and with so little deviation from the established norm of quality that readers and critics found election among them extremely difficult. On the other hand, there is the widest possible divergence of opinion on a single title. If there is someone to declare that a given novel is certainly Trollope’s best, there is someone to retort that it is without the slightest doubt his worst. These disagreements can be documented at every turn, but perhaps in the discussion of individual novels readers have caught a sense of the critical disparities and little more evidence need be brought forward. It is not my purpose here, furthermore, to sketch out at length the history of Trollope’s reputation, interesting and significant for literary history as that would be, but to inquire into some of the reasons for the chaos in Trollopian criticism, and to attempt a few personal judgments by way of conclusion.

From Anthony Trollope: Aspects of His Life and Art (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1958), pp. 229–32. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.