Trollope at Full Length

Abstract

It is not surprising … that the most salient aspect of Trollope’s work, compared with that of other novelists, is its enormous bulk. In addition to his short stories, his travel books, and his miscellaneous prose, of which I shall say nothing, he wrote 47 novels extending to more than nine million words. As early as 1858 reviewers of Doctor Thorne were expressing wonder at his productiveness, all unconscious of the flood that was to engulf them during the quarter-century that followed. His contemporaries came gradually to accept Trollope’s fertility as a marvellous fact of nature, yet in a way it has had an unfortunate effect on his reputation. With a few honorable exceptions, critics have hardly tried to comment on his total achievement. They have limited themselves instead either to individual books or to chosen groups of novels. The well-known essay which Henry James wrote after Trollope’s death is a case in point. It takes little account of what Trollope published after 1869, thus in effect omitting the latter half of his career as an active novelist,¹ and is indeed the ‘partial portrait’ that the ever scrupulous James declared it to be.

From The Huntington Library Quarterly, 31 (Aug. 1968), 317–34. Originally an address delivered on 26 February 1967 at the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. Reprinted by permission of the author.