Anthony Trollope; His Work, Associates and Literary Originals

T.H.S. Escott knew Anthony Trollope personally, and this 1913 portrait draws on that intimate acquaintance to reconstruct the life of the novelist who defined the Victorian social novel. Escott traces Trollope's journey from a humiliated schoolboy to a methodical Civil Servant who revolutionized the Post Office while producing over forty novels. The biography examines the complex family dynamics, with his mother Frances Trollope's literary success casting a long shadow, and explores how his tedious postal rounds through rural England supplied the material for those penetrating studies of provincial life. This is also a portrait of a literary generation: Escott illuminates Trollope's relationships with Dickens, Thackeray, and the broader Victorian literary world that shaped an era. For readers who want to understand the man behind the Chronicles of Barsetshire, Escott offers something rare: the perspective of someone who actually knew his subject.