Books: Trollope's Comeback

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For years, Frances Trollope spent her life ministering to dying members of her family with one hand, while supporting the survivors with the other. When her son, Henry, caught tuberculosis, she moved her desk into his room, wrote desperately all through his dying hours. Before Henry died, he passed on his disease to his sister Emily — and Mrs. Trollope wrote beside her daughter's deathbed too.

For Anthony, "a hobbledehoy of 19, without any idea of a career," Frances obtained a clerkship in the London Post Office. Tom, her other son, joined his mother in writing money-making fiction.

(Between them, Frances, Thomas Jr. and Anthony wrote more books than any family in history.) When she died, in Florence, aged 83, indomitable Frances Trollope had written 114 volumes in 33 years.

"Her career," remarks Son Anthony, in a classic understatement, "offers great encouragement to those who have not begun early in life, but are still ambitious to do something before they depart hence." Post Office Hobbledehoy. For seven years, Trollope was the Post Office's black sheep. Moneylenders trailed him as they had trailed his mother; twice he was led off to jail for debt (but not locked up).

He spent his evenings, he admits, not in "reading good books and drinking tea," but lounging around with "a fast set ... given to cards and tobacco (and) spirits." He always "wished (he) had never been born," and looked so abject that once, after he had conducted the Queen of Saxony on an official tour of the Post Office, her gentleman-in-waiting pressed a half crown into his grimy hand. When he was offered a transfer to a bleak section of Ireland, Trollope gratefully accepted it.

It was the turning point of his life.

Through his postal-inspection tours, which he made on horseback, he discovered his greatest passion — foxhunting. Ireland's informal manners and poverty not only made him feel at ease, but gave him dignity. To the amazement of his superiors in London, he became a respected, hard working civil servant. He made his first return to England at the age of 30 with a bride, a decent salary, and his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran.

Paradise of Normalcy. In lonely adolescence, Trollope had spent hours day dreaming. But the stories he had fashioned in his mind had not been extravagant dreams of glory. Years of feeling himself an outcast had led him to picture paradise as a place in which everything was average and normal. Consequently, his dreams (and later, his novels) were built out of the most everyday events, moved precisely in the tempo of everyday Victorian life, and partook of that era's utter confidence in its own continuation:

"For weeks, for months . . . from year to year, I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions, and proprieties, and unities. Nothing impossible was ever introduced ... I myself was of course my own hero. . . . But I never became a king, or a duke. ... I never was a learned man, nor even a philosopher. But I was a very clever person, and beautiful young women used to be fond of me."