Anthony Trollope became one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of Trollope's best-loved works, known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire; he also wrote penetrating novels on political, social, and gender issues and conflicts of his day.
Trollope has always been a popular novelist. Noted fans have included Sir Alec Guinness, former British Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Sir John Major, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, American novelists Sue Grafton and Dominick Dunne and soap opera writer Harding Lemay. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he regained the esteem of critics by the mid-twentieth century.
Trollope invented the postbox. Well, sort of. Born in 1815, Trollope worked for the Post Office for 33 years until his retirement in 1867 – by which time he was making so much money from his writing that he could afford to live by his pen full-time. During his time as surveyor general of the Post Office, he introduced the pillar box to Britain when they were trialled on the island of Jersey in 1854 (they were introduced to mainland Britain a year later). The pillar boxes were originally painted green, but in 1874 they were changed to red – supposedly because people kept bumping into them.
He wrote every day before going to work. Anthony Trollope began his writing day at 5.30 every morning, and would write for three hours before going off to his day job at the Post Office. He wrote 250 words every 15 minutes, pacing himself with a watch. He paid his servant an extra £5 a year to wake him up with a cup of coffee. Such productivity would enable him to write 47 novels, as well as an autobiography and, like his mother Frances Anthony TrollopeTrollope, travel books. When a young Henry James met Trollope on a transatlantic voyage in 1875, he found that Trollope shut himself up in his cabin every morning in order to write. Because of his astonishing productivity as a novelist, some critics haven’t considered Trollope a serious writer – partly because he treated writing so much like a business, rather than as an art.
Long before George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, he wrote an early example of the dystopian novel. The Fixed Period, published in 1882, was Trollope’s last novel to be published in his lifetime (he died later the same year), and is set almost a century in the future, in 1980. Mandatory euthanasia is introduced for all inhabitants of the isle of Britannula when they turn 67 years of age, perhaps reflecting Trollope’s own awareness of his advancing years (he was 67 when the book appeared).
He died following a fit of the giggles. Shortly after laughing heartily at F. Anstey’s 1882 comic novel Vice Versa, Trollope suffered a stroke and died just over a month later, having never really recovered. He left a loving wife and children – Trollope’s wife read almost everything he wrote (and there was a lot of it) before he sent it off to the publisher. His son published his Autobiography after Trollope’s death, the royalties from the book acting as a sort of inheritance for Trollope Junior.
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