Anthony Trollope

Abstract

Elderly novelists, depressed by the spectacle of their waning popularity, may think of Trollope and be comforted. He was admired in his own day, though never so much as Dickens or Thackeray, but before the end of his long life his reputation had begun to decline. His books had fewer readers, and those mainly among Philistines; the pundits, led by Henry James, declared he was stupid; all serious critics agreed that he would not ‘live’. Yet here we are in 1934, and if to be read is to live, Trollope is still very much alive — more alive than Thackeray, more alive than Henry James himself — and among fastidious readers. Indeed he is almost the only Victorian novelist whom our sensitive intelligentsia appear to be able to read without experiencing an intolerable sense of jar.

From Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), abridged from pp. 227–53. Originally published as Early Victorian Novelists (1934). Reprinted by permission of Constable & Co., and of the author.