Trollope, Anthony (1815–82). Trollope's reputation suffered from the frank admission in his Autobiography (1883) that he set out to write 1,000 words an hour, checked by his watch. Many took this as evidence that he was a mere journeyman, a word-spinner. But his stock has risen dramatically, and, like Eliot and Bennett, he is a historian's novelist, filling in the social background with care and detail. Though a contemporary of Dickens (1812–70), he seems to belong to a later generation, having dropped much of the moralizing, the sentimentality, and the Gothic caricaturing. His political novels are greatly admired, but there is something in the criticism that they show the political world with politics left out. Indeed Trollope was not very familiar with politics, and did not greatly enjoy what he saw of it—particularly as Liberal candidate for the corrupt borough of Beverley in 1868. Nor is it easy to retain patience with Trollope's favourite character, the duke of Omnium, a languid Whig. He is better at drawing clerics in his Barchester novels— Revd Obadiah Slope in Barchester Towers (1857) or Revd Septimus Harding in The Warden (1855); Irish plotters in his early novel The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847); civil service rivalry in The Three Clerks (1858); or perhaps, most memorably, shady plausible swindlers like Ferdinand Lopez in The Prime Minister (1876), or Melmotte in The Way We Live now (1875), a novel that haunts after more than 100 years. Trollope's life was uneventful—that of a hard-working Post Office official, whose claim to fame was the introduction of pillar boxes in the 1850s.

J. A. Cannon