Trollope at Work on The Way We Live Now

Abstract

two facts are universally known about Trollope: that he invented the pillar-box and that he wrote his novels ‘mechanically’. Both pieces of knowledge require modification.¹ By examination of the manuscript material of The Way We Live Now this chapter aims to revise the vulgar misconception (to some extent projected by the author himself) of Trollope’s working methods.² In the model which emerges, Trollope would seem faithfully to have observed his own maxim that ‘to think of a novel is much harder than to write it’. His fiction typically began with a commercial transaction and precise, contractual specification. The first stage of subsequent creative work involved intense imaginative construction (‘thinking’). In the Autobiography, Trollope describes this phase as ‘castle-building’ or cohabitation with those ‘old friends’ his characters.³ He gives a vivid account of this preliminary absorption in his unwritten novel in the essay ‘A Walk in a Wood’.⁴ Although this activity was preeminently mental, it would appear from The Way We Live Now that some unsystematic note-making might accompany it.