Trollope’s Theory and Practice of Novel-Writing

Abstract

Bradford Booth and Richard Stang both give sympathetic accounts, accurate as far as they go, of some important aspects of Trollope’s theory of the novel.’ His ideal of fiction as they convey it is broadly speaking ‘a picture of common life enlivened by humour and sweetened by pathos’,² which teaches wholesome moral lessons by means of fictional exemplars who are neither wholly good nor wholly evil. While both Professor Booth and Professor Stang admit the superiority of Trollope’s practice over his theory, they nevertheless miss some of the most interesting features of the latter. Only such aspects as have hitherto been neglected or misrepresented will be dealt with here; but these will be found to be fundamental to Trollope’s relation to his contemporaries, while contributing substantially to a new interpretation of his complete fictional output.