Anthony Trollope

Abstract

Anthony Trollope usually wrote for three hours in the morning early, and timed himself to write 250 words every quarter of an hour.¹ He also wrote in railway trains. These historical facts are fairly well known, and in consequence the imaginative work of Trollope is lightly valued and often neglected. It is taken as mechanical hackwork; what was so easily and regularly turned out is supposed to be of corresponding small value. Obviously there is a petitio principii here; it is assumed that the value varies inversely as the velocity. Further, Trollope never took to himself any great credit as a literary man; he does not seem to have thought much of literary fame; he was not ambitious, he was not jealous; he did not want to differ from the kindly race of men who played whist in clubs between five and seven in the afternoon. His own opinion about himself and his writings is worth some consideration from those who are curious about the lives and methods of artists. The books themselves are worth reading, whatever the author may have thought about them; I have a long acquaintance with many of them, and undiminished readiness for more, and I am still left wondering at the modesty of Anthony Trollope and his apparently low estimate of his own achievements in fiction. He had much to be proud of and good excuses for boasting, if his temper had led him that way. But in truth he was too proud and secure to boast; his even, balanced soul knew what it required from the world and what it was prepared to give, and so his business was carried on without any overdraft at the bankers.

From On Modern Literature: Lectures and Addresses by W. P. Ker, eds Terence Spencer and James Sutherland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), abridged from pp. 136–46. Originally presented as a lecture at University College, London, probably about 1912. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.