Technical Features

Abstract

A widely held view of Trollope is that he is the most realistic of Victorian novelists. According to Lord David Cecil in Early Victorian Novelists (1934), Trollope’s realism is created ‘simply by reproducing experience as exactly as possible. He draws always with his eye fixed on his object, never modifying its character, either to illustrate a theory or to improve his artistic effect.’ Yet Cecil goes on to assert that this realism is the reason why Trollope is not a novelist of the first rank, since a great novelist ‘is not just an accurate observer. Indeed his greatness does not depend on his accuracy. It depends on his power to use his observation to make a new world in his creative imagination.’ This shows the divided attitude that critics tend to have towards realism. It is positive in that it is a mark of a novel’s faithfulness to experience, but negative when it inhibits the use of the imagination to transcend the world of fact. Many critics’ low evaluation of Trollope can be traced to a difficulty in resolving this contradiction.