Talk:Anthony Trollope

2003 post
what the heck is a pillar box.

It's a kind of UK post box. Usually bright red. Defined by http://www.rchme.gov.uk/thesaurus/mon_types/P/71139.htm as: "A hollow pillar, erected in a public place, containing a receptacle for posting letters."

I may be doing Catalyst a disservice here, but the recently-added paragraphs sound a little like something copied from a book. Can Catalyst please:


 * 1) Reassure us that they are not copyright
 * 2) Review the additions with regard to the NPOV policy

Deb 21:19 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)

May I also add a comment here. I have been away from the site for a considerable period of time, have however been working on a Trollope article. How much detail is required in an article? Catalyst's article reads very well but is rather short on detail. I add my work to the talk to start with, perhaps Catalyst or someone could either incorporate it or whatever.

Anthony Trollope British novelist April, 1815 - 6 December, 1882)

Anthony Trollope, born at 6 Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, London, was the fourth son of Frances Trollope, née Milton, herself a novelist of some eminence, and Thomas Anthony Trollope, a barrister. At the age of one the family moved to a house called Julians near Harrow expecting an inheritence from his great uncle that never came. The business fell off, as his father's temper alienated the clients.

In 1822 he became a day boy at Harrow School. He was the dunce of the class, dirty and badly-dressed. 1825 he transfered to Arthur Drury's private school at Sunbury. Two years later in 1827 he went to his father's old school, Winchester, where his older brother Thomas is a prefect. His mother goes to America, in on a plan to build a bazaar in Cincinnati, Ohio for the sale of English goods. This fails and causes the family's final ruin. In 1830 he has to return to Harrow school.

1832 his mother publishes Domestic Manners of the Americans, a satirical novel that, though widely disliked in America, becomes popular in Britan, enabling her to support the family. But in 1834 unable to win a university scholarship, family moved to Bruges, Belgium. There the family remain, his father dying in 1835, his older brother, Henry, and his younger sister, Emily, the following year.

Through influence of friends Trollope obtained in the autumn 1834 a junior clerk's job in the General Post Office, at £90 a year. He had seven lonely years of dingy poverty in London, making few friends and earning a reputation for insubordination, until his transfer in 1841 to Banagher, Ireland, as a deputy postal surveyor, put him financially at ease and introduced him to a larger, freer, outdoor life. His awkwardness disappeared; he took up fox-hunting (which he followed enthusiastically until 1878); and in June 1844 he married Rose Heseltine, daughter of a Rotherham bank-manager. 1859 promoted to a post in Mallow, Ireland, traveled on postal missions to western England in 1851, Belfast in 1853, Donnybrook near Dublin in 1854, and to Egypt, Scotland, and the West Indies in 1858-1859. Finally promoted to Surveyor General at £800 a year the family move to Waltham Cross (near London).

In 1847 his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, searching for the sources of Irish discontent was published. Next year saw the appearence of The Kellys and the O'Kellys. Neither of these did well. In 1855 The Warden, started in July 1852, the first in the series of the Barsetshire chronicles (1855-67) appeared.

In 1867 he retired from the Post Office, stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a Liberal and edited St Paul's Magazine, in which several of his were serialized.

He wrote 47 novels and 16 other books with sales often exceeding 100,000. In his autobiography, which appeared posthumously in 1883, his writings brought him £70,000.

The Macdermots of Ballycloran 1847 The Kellys and the O'Kellys 1848 The Warden 1855 The Three Clerks 1858 Doctor Thorne 1858 The Bertrams Framely Parsonage 1861 Orley Farm 1862 The Small House at Allington 1864 Can You Forgive Her? 1864 The Belton Estate 1865 The Claverings 1867 The Last Chronicle of Barset 1867 Phineas Finn 1869 He knew he was right 1869 The Eustace Diamonds 1873 Phineas Redux 1874 The Way We Live Now 1875 The Prime Minister 1876 The American Senator 1877 Is He Popenjoy? 1878 The Duke's Children 1880 Ayala's Angel 1881 Dr. Wortel's School 1881 An Autobiography 1883

BigRat

Removal
Took out "Other novels include Cousin Henry and Dr Wortle's School, both probing psychological and moral studies in the vein of The Warden" These can hardly be considered his best work. Clarityfiend 05:55, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Return to England
If he returned to England in 1859, as stated in the section "Time In Ireland", then the paragraph commencing His first major success came with The Warden (1855)... in "Return to England" is anachronistic and should be in the former section. jiHymas@himivest.com 216.191.217.90 20:15, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

proposed external link
I'd like to add a link like: to the External Links section. This links to a list of Trollope books that you can download to read on a cell phone. I have read quite a few from this site and got a lot of value out being able to read the PD texts away from the PC.
 * Free to read on a cell phone - Anthony Trollope works.

The texts are Public Domain in the US, just like Project Gutenberg, they are packaged with the reader and available under a creative commons licence (share if (attribution, non-commercial, no derivative) ). The site is non-commercial without registration, subscription, or advertising. The texts as packaged together with the reader as a java program that runs on cell phones, this is a way for people to access the authors work that adds to the range in the existing external links (hopefully translating to more reading going on).

I checked WP:EL and the link seems appropriate: Filomath 01:03, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
 * What should be linked: '...should link to a site hosting a copy of the work if none of the "Links normally to be avoided" criteria apply.'
 * Links normally to be avoided: it seems only #8 might apply; 'Direct links to documents that require external applications (such as Flash or Java) to view the relevant content...'. The site lets you download java programs that only run on a J2ME environment, this means most/all current cell phones. So although they are limited to being read on a phone they do add an access method to all the others in the existing External Links, in the same way that LibriVox adds a format but requires an mp3 player.

Time in Ireland
Ireland isn’t one place: shouldn’t the article say where specifically in Ireland Trollope lived and worked? I know he lived for a while in Belfast, and worked in its magnificent Custom House. But, since I’m benighted on the details, I hope some aficionados can add the specifics. Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dedalus22 (talk • contribs) 08:36, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Writing Style
Please, could some one add a section on Anthony Trollope writing style? thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.150.49.165 (talk) 18:08, 17 June 2010 (UTC) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway#Writing_style

sp.: Londom
Please, someone who understands reflist, correct the spelling in note # 10. Ragityman (talk) 05:10, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Pic


Here are some new pics of Trollope in case they're needed.

Block quotation from Henry James
There is a block quotation from Henry James in the "Works and reputation" section, attributed to "an essay shortly after the novelist's death." I searched for a source and found that the block quotation is pretty much faithful to James's compilation Partial Portraits, published in 1888 - see. But the actual essay appeared in The Century in 1883 and has some significant wording changes - see. Does anyone know the background on this - was it a habit of James to silently revise his works when republishing them? Which source should be direct-quoted here? More recent sources I have seen that quote this passage use the Partial Portraits version, and for now I will keep it in this article with ref to the source. Zariane (talk) 16:03, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

Project Gutenberg links
For future reference, I just put all of Project Gutenberg's Trollope ebooks into Wikipedia templates, and saved the results here. I've been through all the current articles and ensured that they have templates, but any new articles should also have a template added if possible. NotFromUtrecht (talk) 14:30, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Biography
(Trollope's father) failed at the bar due to his bad temper. I am not at all clear what the editor concerned meant here but I don't think this is appropriate. Please would someone fix it. Eddaido (talk) 11:16, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20100730232732/http://www.trollopeusa.org:80/tsociety/trollopebio.html to http://www.trollopeusa.org/tsociety/trollopebio.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110326045206/http://www.trollopeusa.org:80/index.html to http://www.trollopeusa.org/index.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110716055911/http://www.ulsterhistory.co.uk/anthonytrollope.htm to http://www.ulsterhistory.co.uk/anthonytrollope.htm
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130928214613/http://www.city-journal.org/article02.php?aid=1465 to http://www.city-journal.org/article02.php?aid=1465

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Eliminate "Notable fans..." paragraph?
I'd like to delete the final paragraph in the "Works and reputation" section of the current version of the article: "Notable fans have included..." Since this paragraph has been part of the article for a while, though, I'll put it up for discussion here before doing the WP:BOLD thing and deleting it.

My problem with this paragraph is that it's just a list of notable people who liked Trollope, with no indication that Trollope actually had any effect on their areas of notability. For instance, it lists three prime ministers (two UK, one Canadian), but doesn't suggest that Trollope affected their politics in any way. It lists writers, but doesn't say whether Trollope had any significant effect on their writing.

I'd suggest deleting this paragraph altogether. If we find a reliable source to verify that Trollope was, in fact, a major influence on a writer or politician, we can include that. However, a mere list of notable people who enjoyed Trollope conveys little useful information to the reader. — Ammodramus (talk) 01:58, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

The Muse
I've altered the following:

"The Muse, in their view, might prove immensely prolific, but she would never ever follow a schedule.[...]The Muse, claimed the critics, should not be aware of money."

The meaning of these sentences is a bit opaque - people were not angry with Trollope, but indignant on behalf of "the Muse? - and the link cited is from a book by John D Barry, published in 1915, which doesn't mention the Muses at all. It simply says that at the time Trollope's Autobiography was published, people liked to think of writers as "inspired," even "as doing their work by means of a divine agency," adding, "As if we did not all do our work by a divine agency no matter what the work may be." This sounds like a general reference to any deity. There is also no reference to a writer's interest in money, or people's view of how "the Muse" should feel about money.

I've removed references to "the Muse" and said instead "when Trollope revealed that he strictly adhered to a daily writing quota, and admitted that he wrote for money, he confirmed his critics' worst fears.[52] Writers were expected to wait for inspiration, not to follow a schedule.[53]" Sadiemonster (talk) 08:28, 8 September 2018 (UTC)

The Way We Live Now
The following sentence ought to be removed:

"In particular, critics who concur that the book was not popular when published, generally acknowledge the sweeping satire The Way We Live Now (1875) as his masterpiece.[49]"

This is, first of all, irresponsibly vague. Which critics? Several critics, and this reader for one, consider TWWLN to be overrated; it is popular today because of its title, because of the vogue for 'big' books, and because it happens to intersect with several of our contemporary obsessions. As a portrait of society it's rather inferior to several other of Trollope's novels; it's also vastly inferior to Vanity Fair. It is also not representative of Trollope as, say, The Small House at Allington or Phineas Finn are.

But that's just my opinion; the question is whether it is true that 'critics generally' believe (not 'acknowledge') TWWLN to be his masterpiece.

No justification is given in the newspaper article to which the link takes us. It's just one random person professing her liking for the novel. Nor is there anything in the article to suggest that its author is a trustworthy or even informed source. She says that Henry James 'sneered at Trollope as having a 'complete appreciation of the usual'." But James was not sneering. He was praising Trollope for his mastery of 'the usual'.

The article also makes several contentions, such as its opening assertion that the novel is 'unremittingly racist about Jews and respectful of posh people' which will not stand up to argument. There is at least one Jewish character who is more admirable than most of the Christians, and nobody who has read, say, Trollope's depiction of the De Courcy family can call him 'respectful of posh people'.

But the point here is that a single article in which one individual asserts that this novel is 'the one we most admire him for' does not prove anything. Who are 'we', and who is the author to speak for 'us'?

Ideally, an encyclopedia article about a novelist should give the reader some idea of the variety of critical opinion about his novels. Which established critics have admired or failed to admire which novels, and why?

Update: Adam Gopnik is not an author I often find myself agreeing with. But in the New Yorker (May 4th 2015) he calls The Way We Live Now "the only truly illiberal novel Trollope wrote", "a surprisingly bad-tempered work" and, (in view hitting the nail on the head) "the Trollope novel for people who don't like Trollope novels." He suspects, again I think accurately, that it "has gained popularity mainly because of its all-purpose title and its very atypical spleen."

Furthermore I see that the Guardian (11th April 2015) asked 14 authors to choose their favorite Trollope novel, and only two chose TWWLN. That may or may not mean anything; the Guardian may well have discouraged more than two authors from choosing the same novel. The only other novels that get more than one vote are Phineas Finn and The Prime Minister, each with two votes also, but this at least suggest that there is no 'general' consensus such as the sentence to which I object implies. Again, I vote that it be removed.

Trollope in the West Indies
So far there's no mention of his trip to the West Indies - and he even wrote a book about it. Any reason for that?

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2604:2000:E3C4:D400:F4F8:E37A:ED56:9827 (talk) 22:56, 29 December 2018 (UTC)


 * Nor of the shockingly racist commentary in the resulting book about the trip. Made my hair curl. Researching… Tim Bray (talk) 05:18, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

Clarify critical dismissal
I just added clarify-span to "Early Works." From the other references & what they appear to be justifying, I would guess that during Trollope's life, or at least at the time the critics were writing, that nobody particularly objected to those critics who claimed he was more influenced by England or harmed by Ireland. It was only recently that MODERN critics said this was bigoted. In which case we should say something like "More recently, such critics have been dismissed..." [cites recent revisionist criticism]. But that's just a guess, and somebody should clarify what this statement means. I tried, but I couldn't (easily) get the text of the works cited to prove the claim in the first place. Dingsuntil (talk) 19:29, 28 October 2020 (UTC)