Tracking a Tireless Victorian

...Nothing impossible was ever introduced...

...he referred to this as "castle-building...

...Trollope has been good to his biographers...

...Trollope was almost 32 when he published TheMacdermots of Ballycloran...

...In Egypt, on official business, he finished the second half of his novel Doctor Thorne and the following day set to work on another...

...well before putting pen to paper...

...James, who once crossed the Atlantic on a ship Trollope was a passenger on as well, keeping to his cabin every morning writing away, was critical of Anthony's unswerving industriousness, his coziness with the reader, his lack of structure and form...

...He always knows, down to the last shilling, what his country curates make as a "living" and how much more his archdeacons get...

...He was addicted to the hunt, too, and rode weekly to the hounds...

...In private, it is true, he spoke of the clerical life as a "pill to be swallowed," something that made a man unfit for any other occupation...

...Beginning in 1841 with his Post Office assignment in Ireland, he meticulously kept a diary of his work-week activities and travels, indicating his whereabouts and expenses on any given day for a period of 26 years ending with his retirement...

...Her celebrated account of a sojourn in the United States, Domestic Manners of the Americans, raised the hackles of American readers and delighted the English...

...Hall, a professor at Bronx Community College and the Graduate School of City University of New York, has used this wealth of material well...

...nor even anything which, from outward circumstances, would seem to be violently improbable...

...All this, in tandem with a busy and influential 33-year career in the English Post Office, during which he instituted important reforms in the postal service in Ireland, England and the British West Indies, spoke up for equitable wages for postal employees at home, and negotiated postal treaties abroad in Egypt and the United States...

...Trollope kept up a daily writing schedule of 250 words per page, eight or more pages a day, 40 pages per work week...

...It was, of course, Anthony who came to be regarded as, in the words of one reviewer, "almost anationalinstitution...

...One can easily say much the same for N. John Hall's new biography of Anthony Trollope...

...In London, his literary reputation steadily rising, Trollope was awakened each morning at 5 by his Irish groom Barney, sat downto his desk at 5:30 and produced his daily quota before dressing for breakfast...

...he wrote 47 novels...

...at Harrow, chiefly, and later at Winchester College...

...He also produced some five volumes of short stories and several lively travel books, and ground out articles and book reviews for the more notable London literary and political magazines, among them the Comhill, Blackwood's, the Fortnightly Review and thePallMall Gazette...

...Anthony, with his wry yet generally amiable portraits of English clergymen of both high and low church persuasions, was occasionally considered an anticlerical writer...

...He wrote in railroad carriages, on sea voyages where he had carpenters build writing desks in his cabins, on isolated sheep stations in the Australian bush...

...Anthony's brother, Thomas Adolphus, considered by Fanny the more important writer of the two, was a highly respected novelist in his time...

...He knows the social strategies that rule his villages and shires...

...Indeed, it is no stretch of the imagination to say that he was indefatigable...

...the Garrick, the Cosmopolitan, the Athenaeum...

...His travels and his attention to manners and customs everywhere have spared his biographers the ordeal of trying to write about a sedentary, long-lived, prolific author who did little more than sit down to his desk each morning...

...He knows the ins and outs of the family drama, knows Trollope's major and minor literary friendships, the details of 19th-century publishing business and Trollope's transactions with editors, the religious and political controversies of the period, and the local histories of the real and fictional shires Trollope wrote about, without making a fetish of them...

...Reportedly, the last word he uttered was "No...

...Since Trollope disliked revision, he worked up his characters and situations in his head...

...In addition, Hall's book has all the enviable authority of a biographer who has edited and annotated the letters of his subject (a two-volume edition was published in 1983...

...But there was a period when the family fled to the Continent to escape its creditors...

...One reason for his enormous success, it seems, was his maintaining "certain proportions and proprieties and unities," as he called them...

...The club, a wag once observed, was an ingenious English invention that allowed a man to be exclusive and gregarious at the same time...

...The Trollopes were a writing family...

...Trollope enjoyed a highly active social life...

...In his 35-year career as awriter...

...The Bertrams, N. John Hall tells us in his leisurely and wonderfully informative biography, was written "under 'very vagrant circumstances' at Alexandria, Malta, Gibraltar, London, Glasgow, Dublin, Belfast, Coleraine, Derry, and Kingston, and aboard ship on four separate sea voyages...

...Not to be minimized, either, is Hall's talent for presenting all this in an engaging fashion...

...with some hazard, because of his nearsightedness, in taking the jumps and fences...

...The monthly installments of his novels were avidly read and eagerly discussed throughout his career...

...where he regularly entertained his literary friends and admirers...

...Reviewed by James R. Mellow Author, "Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company" The life of Anthony Trollope is proof positive that in literature perseverance is as important a component of genius as imagination...

...Trollope's father was a failed barrister, landowner and farmer, an irascible man who spent his last years laboring over axiEcclesiastica!Encyclopedia, even though he had no great concern for religion and detested evangelicalism in all its forms...

...Nor did he neglect his devoted wife, and he doted on their two sons...

...with only rare deviation due to illness, postal assignments or a death in the family...

...albeit not by Henry James, who thought Thomas Adolphus' fiction easy to write, easy to read and secondrate at best...

...as a bit more wretched and poverty-stricken than was actually the case...

...Nathaniel Hawthorne, a great admirer of Trollope even before meeting the author on his 1861 American tour, commented that his novels were "just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump of the earth andputit under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting they were being made a show of...

...Trollope's "great, his inestimable merit," in James' view, "was a complete appreciation of the usual...

...Few have investigated more closely than I have done," he remarked, "the depth, and breadth, and water-holding capacities of an Essex ditch...

...HewasamemberofLondon'smost prestigious clubs...

...The mother, Frances, a famous bluestocking, rescued the family from its early financial difficulties with her travel books and popular novels on topical themes like the evils of slavery and child labor...

...He is, along with his principal rivals Thackeray and Dickens, a prime example of the industriousness of England's 19th century authors...

...His vivid characters, his villages full of ordinary lives and concerns, satisfied his readers year after year...

...He also kept work-diaries for his novels, setting down the pages written day by day with cumulative totals for each week...

...This was certainly true in Trollope's case...

...Money, particularly the lack of it, was an abiding concern in Trollope's life and in his books...

...He gives the reader not only a lively portrait of the man but a picture of an age in all its variety, from Trollope's birth in 1815 to his death in 1882, following the stroke that partially paralyzed him and impaired his reason and speech...

...Hall notes that Trollope, a hulking, unkempt, abnormally shy boy, tended in his posthumously published An Autobiography (1883) to paint his childhood and school years...

...His severest critics, however, claimed that he wrote novels "as easily as hens lay eggs...