A photograph of him around age 40, completely unglamorized; it’s not often reprinted
Friend and readers,
Anthony Trollope was born April 24, 1815.
Two tributes also not often reprinted, and a brief comment by Proust which sums up what Margaret Oliphant implied in her (also not sufficiently consulted, but too long to quote here) 4+ page review of Trollope’s An Autobiography (reprinted in Trollope: Interviews & Recollections, ed. R.C. Terry, from which the two passages below also come):
What did he look like:
His outward appearance symbolises, or rather pictures, his inner. When you look at his face, you exclaim, with Addison’s Cato, ‘Plato, thou reasonest well.’ For, as that great one said, the soul chooses a fit house wherein to dwell, you must own that the soul of Trollope has fitted itself with a proper and suggestive tabernacle. His portrait is gaunt, grim, partly grey and looks taller than he is; his eyes are noticeable, dark and brilliant; two strong lines down each side of his mouth, lost in a tufted American-like beard, give him a look of greater ill-nature than he possesses. He is unquestionably a gentleman, but of the middle-class look, by no means of haut école. He gives one an idea — that is, if one knows life and town pretty well — that he has seen hard service in the drudgery of some government office; he has cut-and-dried official look, and seems capable of scolding and otherwise irritating his juniors. He looks his age – about fifty-five – and is a man one would hardly choose to confide in …
— Douglas Jerrold, The Housekeeper, on whom see Spartacus Educational, and wikipedia, his son Blanchard Jerrold’s great picture book is London: A Pilgrimage, illustrated by Gustave Doré
How did his inward personality strike people in his presence:
Nobody could see anything of him without feeling that he was in the presence of an exceptionally high-minded as well as an exceptionally gifted man, a man of strong feelings as of strong sense, but a man who well knew how to keep his feelings in check, and a man whose practice as well as his theory was Christian. He told me once a story — and the story was pathetic enough as he told it with all its details — of a certain work of his having been claimed by someone else, and of the inevitable exposure which followed the claim; and his own feeling was of pity for the claimant. This, told without the impression which his own manner of telling it conveyed, seems a trifling thing by which to illustrate the noble qualities of a man who was great in more than one sense; but the absolute simplicity of it, the complete incapacity to imagine that anyone telling such a story could tell it with any other feeling, made an enduring impression on me; and it seemed to me strange to reflect that had he for purposes of fiction had to describe a man with a particle of meanness in him, telling such a story, he would have brought out the meanness in the most easy and most lifelike way. What he would have seized on with quick instinct as a novelist was out of his ken as a man.
Something has been said as to the wide grasp of Mr Trollope’s powers and intellect, and this applied to what his mind took in as well as to what it gave out. He was, in the truest sense of the word, a well-read man, and he used always to read for a given time in the early morning, before sitting down to his task of composition …
— Walter Herries Pollock, From “Anthony Trollope,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 66 (May 1883) — Trollope’s neighbor in Montagu Square
Proust (Contre Saint-Beuve)
qu’un livre est le produit d’un autre moi que celui que nous manifestons dans nos habitudes, dans la societe, dans nos vices . . . [The man who appears in conversation and drawing-room essays is … not] le moi qui a attendu pendant qu’ on etait avec les autres, qu’ on sent bien le seul reel, et pour lequel seuls les artistes finis sent par vivre’. [A book is the product of another self than the one we show in our habits, in society, in our vices …. the self who waits while one is with others, whom one feels is the sole real I, for whom in the end artists live, my translation]
John Everett Millais, “Judge Staveley and His Daughter, for Orley Farm
Trollope said he loved Millais as a man, he certainly loved many of Millais’s illustrations to his novels, he had the whole set for Orley Farm which, it’s said, he looked at many times. This one, my favorite of the series, is a typical one of depiction of imminent loss retrieved.
About another (of Lady Mason, the heroine) he said as narrator of Orley Farm (that is, inside the novel):
In an early part of this story I have endeavoured to describe how this woman sat alone, with deep sorrow in her heart and deep thought on her mind, when she first learned what what terrible things were coming on her. The idea, however, which the reader will have conceived of her as she sat there will have come to him from the skill of the artist, and not from the words of the writer. If that drawing is now near him, let him go back to it. Lady Mason was again sitting in the same room — that pleasant room, looking out through the verandah on to the sloping lawn, and in the same chair; one hand again rested open on the arm of the chair, while the other supported her face as she leaned upon her elbow; and the sorrow was still in her heart and the deep thought in her mind. But the lines of her face were altered, and the spirit expressed by it was changed. There was less of beauty, less of charm, less of softness; but in spite of all that she had gone through there was more of strength, — more of the power to resist all that this world could do to her.
Ellen just now rereading The American Senator
I know no more effective appreciation of the nature of Trollope’s fiction than Simon Raven’s description of his struggle to adapt the 6 Pallisers novels into 26 one hour films for TV:
“A is a boring and apparently superfluous women: I shall delete her [major characters deleted include from CYFH? the Widow Greenow and her suitors; from PF, Mr and Mrs Low; from ED, Lucy Morris, Lady Fawn, Lady Linlothgow, Lucinda Roanoke, and Mr Camperdown; from PR. Mr Maule; from PM, Arthur Fletcher, Mrs Roby; from DC, Lady Cantrip and Lord Popplecourt]; But if I delete her I also delete most of the motive power behind her husband, B, who is a social climber and a minor but essential piece of mechanism. All right: let us have B motivated, not by his wife A, but by his old crony, C. A very neat suggestion [e.g., Barrington Erle and Mr Monk’s roles are expanded to motivate and link actions] – were not not that B and C have quarreled in the second chapter and refuse to talk to each other for the next seven-eights of the novel. Very well: delete their quarrel. I can’t because the quarrel is the delayed fuse which detonates the grand denouement 700 pages later; whichever way I look at it, I cannot substitute C for A as the driving force behind B. All right: bring back A after all. But somebody has to go, indeed half of them have to go, and it is the same trouble with everyone I try to get rid of: they all keep pushing themselves back in again for seemingly ungainsayable reasons”
From Michael Barber. The Captain: The Life and Times of Simon Raven. (London: Duckworth, 1996):188.
I just finished listening to The Eustace Diamonds this morning on my way to work and I miss the characters already. One character that haunts me is poor Lucinda Roanoke, one wonders what her fate is bound to be. Knowing something of the treatment given to the mentally ill in the late 19th century, I fear for her and pity her. The Eustace Diamonds is only one part of a magnificent panorama.
I did not know that it was Anthony Trollope’s birthday, I will celebrate his life by getting another book on CD, The Way We Live Now, if i can find it. Have you noticed that books on CD are dwindling in availabilty now that Amazon has bought Audible.com and seems bent on only providing downloads in mp3 format? I dont have that capabiity in my Jeep and am going to have to start going to library sales.
I liked The American Senator, and am looking forward to your posts on it. Poor Arabella! But she didn’t have to be “put out of the way”, she had the chance to live even if in a somewhat less sparkling marriage than she would have liked.
Trollope is very hard on Arabella. I wish he were as hard on the males in his novels who marry for money. Just reread “Wonderful bird!” When people ask me which is my favorite chapter in all Trollope, I usually trot out “A Long Day in London” (Mr Harding in The Warden), but there’s another I’m so fond of, in a very different spirit. This. I was as delighted as ever with that parrot and old lady. And how fresh Trollope seems. Not an older man at all 🙂
Glenn: Very good. Thank you for the link. How is your Mapping Trollope project progressing? Do we get a sneak preview or will copyright intervene?
Me: I’m no where near writing it as yet. I am reading the third of four novels I’ve chosen for the sake of the mapping: The American Senator. The 4 important ones for mapping I’ve chosen are Castle Richmond and Framley Parsonage (in both a map has developed), Phineas Redux (maps of London abound in Trollope’s novels but this one is used intensely in the court
room scenes for argument and I once was taken on a walk through the area following the route Phineas was accused of following to murder Bonteen) and AS for its startlingly detailed description of a county (Dillsborough) and two country houses, exquisitely spatially, geographically described, and central to the story and characters and themes.