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He Helped the Heart to Know Itself
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10081 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1993 |
2,266 Words |
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Woody West
Woody West is associate editor of the Washington Times. |
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
Victoria Glendinning
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993
551 pp., $25.00
In his autobiography, published a year after his death in 1882, novelist Anthony Trollope concluded, "Now I stretch out my hand, and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words that I have written."
In that valedictory there is an engaging reflection of the man and the writer-unadorned style, affecting imagery, genuine lack of pretension. In a writing career that began well into his maturity, and combined with thirty-three years as a busy post office official, Trollope published forty-seven novels, half a dozen volumes of short stories, several more on travel, and a couple of biography, not to mention occasional journalism.
The prolific writer's popularity was cresting a decade before his death at sixty-seven, but it had not in any way approached that of such contemporaries as Thackeray and Dickens. Since Trollope's adieu from that further shore, however, he has continued to be admired by those who have made his literary acquaintance with an avidity that seems significantly greater than his reputation in the canon (however that wobbly category now fares) would inspire.
Trollope thoroughly knew and chronicled a world as different from our own as nearly could be conceived. His novels describe a social and political landscape that barely existed in the United States and is vestigial in the United Kingdom--the mid-Victorian culture of the upper middle class and the aristocracy. Trollope was by no means of democratic, or even of republican, persuasion. The standards of behavior, the imperative of duty and honor manifest in all his writing, had no situational elasticity, and, through he clearly recognized the inevitability of change, Trollope was indelibly a traditionalist.
Those attributes might be expected to diminish the reputation of the novelist during the era of modernism and, now, postmodernism. What, therefore, is his appeal today, when novels of moral sensibility must compete with a popular literature that evades when it does not deride sensibility, moral and otherwise? All, or nearly all, of his fiction remains in print, and the Trollope Society of London and New York, in association with the Folio Society, is now publishing a uniform edition of the forty-seven
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