[Published October 2002]
[Published April 2003]
[Published October 2003]
[Published October 2003]

An Autobiography by Anthony Trollope

Introduced by John Sutherland 240 pages
'THAT I, OR any man, should tell everything of himself I hold to be impossible ... [but] nothing I shall say shall be untrue.' The early chapters of Trollope's version of his life resound with the miseries of his childhood. Everything his father Thomas touched resulted in disaster: his law practice having failed he turned to farming in Harrow, but that too was doomed. The family moved constantly, a few steps ahead of the bailiffs, and Thomas descended into a pathological depression which left the burden of keeping the family afloat increasingly upon Trollope's mother Fanny. Several of her children were sickly, and the more physically robust Anthony perceived himself as all but ignored. The resentment he felt burns strongly in these early pages. When the family briefly decamped to America, the teenaged Anthony was left all alone in London, and the author says school bills went unpaid, that he became a pariah at school.

In 1834 Trollope secured a post as a junior clerk in the Post Office. He skilfully glosses over this period, but it was probably the lowest ebb in his life: he had little money, he ran up debts, and probably had unsuitable liaisons with several women. All Trollope will tell us is that 'dirt' attached to him, that he was a 'hobbledehoy'.

As a last gamble, Trollope applied for a job as Postal Surveyor in Ireland, (an unpopular posting) and his life was magically transformed: 'all these evils went away from me.' He began, tentatively at first, to write fiction; he applied himself to his job; he met and married his wife Rose, about whom he refuses to say anything. He is anxious to show how he turned his life around, and his tone changes, becomes more authoritative. He tells us his theories on the writing of fiction; his working methods - his meticulous time-sheets, his plot break-downs, the amounts of money he is so obviously proud to have earned; and we get his candid - mostly wrong-headed - opinions about his own novels. But the proud author of these chapters inadvertently shows us another picture of himself, a man who is laceratingly sensitive and insecure. Here he is on some minor incident of humiliation at school: 'All that was fifty years ago, and it burns me now as though it were yesterday.' An Autobiography reveals, directly and indirectly, the author's intense vulnerability, doubtless deriving from the neglect he perceived in his childhood. R.H. Super's 1988 biography of Trollope dismisses An Autobiography as untrustworthy, yet The Rev. W. Lucas Collins, a close family friend, wrote to Trollope's son Henry after reading the manuscript which Trollope had left for posthumous publication. Collins wrote: 'Every word reveals to me the man himself, his warm heart, sterling honesty, abhorrence of meanness and injustice and even his prejudices.'

Publication Price £29 / $58

'On the whole I regard [it] as the best book that has come from my pen. It is short. And, I think I may venture to say, amusing, useful and true … I never made a single note while writing or preparing it.'Anthony Trollope

With its idiosyncratic array of characters - from the rich Emperor Soulouque, the former monarch of Haiti; a patronising Foreign Office mandarin Sir William Ousely; or Sally, the Guianese chambermaid - why is it that this work has so very rarely been in print? Sir Stephen Tumim is quite sure of the reason: because the book deals so seriously and carefully with the theme of race. Trollope himself saw this as the 'useful and true' part of his book. He thought that the future lay in miscegenation, and with those he described as coloured people. 'Providence has sent white men and black men to those regions in order that from them may spring a race fitted by intellect for civilisation and by physical organisation for tropical labour.' He looks forward to a time when Britain will not be sending out a white Governor to any of its dependent territories, to 'support the dignity of Queen Victoria's great grandchild's grandchild', but will instead look to the example of the United States as the ideal model of what one of Great Britain's former colonies can achieve. He anticipates 'that happily inevitable day when Australia shall follow in the same path.' Queen Victoria's great grandchild's grandchild is now the Prince of Wales. This was Trollope's first travel book, written between January and June 1859. In An Autobiography he writes that he saw it as his task to give 'to the eye of the reader, and to his ear, that which the eye of the writer has seen and his ear heard'. His experiences in the book were also put to good use in several of his short stories.

Publication Price Vol 1: £20.00/$40 Vol 2: £22.00/$44*

NORTH AMERICA
2 Volumes: 467pp and 494 pp
In writing a book entitled North America, Trollope was of course very conscious of his mother's work, The Domestic Manners of the Americans, which had been published in 1832. He wrote: 'I had entertained for many years an ambition to follow her footsteps there, and to write another book'; and at the end of The West Indies and the Spanish Main he had also proclaimed his desire to write about 'that people who are our children'. He was fascinated with the idea of former colonies, and how they developed away from the influences of their mother country. He was arriving at a good time for a writer: the outbreak of the Civil War was in 1861, and the book was written between September 1861 and April 1862.
As we follow his tour, Trollope interrupts himself to discuss Canada's connection with Britain, an 'apology for the war', the constitution of New York State, women's rights, education, religion, Congress, the Northern Army, the Post Office, hotels, courts, the Federal Constitution and literature. The book was written as he travelled, and has a palpable sense of immediacy, almost of reportage. It is also unashamedly biased in favour of the North. Two themes dominate: the first influence is of the theory of equality on Americans; the second is the war itself. The book was praised greatly in America, and was - naturally - very popular in the Northern States: it did much to erase the unpopular memory of his mother's work. Trollope memorably sums up the Anglo American differences: 'We live in a tea-cup, and they in a washing-tub.'.
North America is part travelogue, part guidebook, part political commentary; sometimes it is the detail which contemporary critics found trivial, which to our modern eyes is most fascinating. But the overwhelming value of this book lies in what it tells us about the author himself: his interest in politics; state education; the strange mixture of conservatism and liberalism he exhibited, his belief in the future of 'the English World', his love of travel, and his extraordinary energy.

Publication Price :Vols 1& 2: £28.00/ $56*

'Our colonies are the land in which our cousins, the descendants of our forefathers, are living and still speaking our language.'

'The Briton …. knows that he has to get possession of the land and use it …but he knows also that it is wrong to take what does not belong to him … As I am myself a Briton I am not a fair critic … but it does seem to me that he is upon the whole beneficent, though occasionally very unjust.'

South Africa amply displays the author's broadmindedness, as well as showcasing his taste for both overview and vignette, all related with his characteristic dry humour.

Publication Price Vols 1 & 2: £28.95 / $57.90*

AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND
Two Volumes approx 300pp and 512pages
The result of Trollope's journey which he took in 1871 - 1872. He spent thirteen months in Australia and two months in New Zealand. His wife Rose accompanied him for this trip, the primary reason for which was the opportunity to see their younger son Fred, a 'squatter in new South Wales since 1865. Trollope visited many of the larger towns, visiting gold mines, sheep stations (including Fred's in the chapter entitled 'Station Life in the Bush'). He hunted kangaroos, attended duck shoots, and also made sure to stay with anyone of importance on his visits to the capital cities.

Trollope found much to admire on his visit. He was impressed by the way in which class divisions seemed to have been reduced amongst the colonials he met, a form of the 'advanced conservative liberalism he was to propound a few years later in An Autobiography. But this is somewhat challenged by views which we find unpalatable today, particularly towards the Aborigines whom he describes as 'ineradicably savage', and the Maoris, whom he finds labouring under 'the incubus of barbarous superstition'. Trollope predicts that 'civilisation' will take its inevitable course, and that both cultures will soon all but vanish under the pressure of colonialism.

Trollope's journey found outlet in two of his novels: Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, based on his son Fred's experiences as a squatter; and John Caldigate, where his eponymous hero makes his fortune in the gold-prospecting fields Trollope had himself inspected.

Publication Price Vol 1: £30.95 / $61.90 Vol 2: £29.95 / $59.90*

THE LIFE OF CICERO
Two Volumes Approx 290pages and 288pages Published in APRIL 2003
One of Trollope's fiercest desires was to expunge his dismal academic record: The Life of Cicero was in some ways an attempt to remake himself as a classicist, an 'opus magnum for my old age'. His intention here is to reclaim Cicero's reputation from the clutch of Victorian historians whom he saw as venerating Caesar at the expense of Cicero.
He traces Cicero's career as a student, a lawyer, a solider and politician, as well as his private life, and he does so in a narrative that is warm and witty. But Trollope remains throughout a cool observer, and - as he so often did in his novels - he brings up the eternal moral question of how to shape a course of action through an engaged public life wherein the decisions are not easy, and right and wrong are not immediately apparent. This view of Cicero, somewhat unorthodox and unpopular at the time, has increasingly become the accepted line. R H Super called the book Trollope's 'genuine masterpiece.'

Publication Price :Vol 1: £30.95 / $ 61.90 Vol 2: £29.95 / $59.90*

LONDON TRADESMEN
One Volume 192 pp Published in OCTOBER 2003
Originally a series of anonymous articles for the Pall Mall Gazette, published between July and September 1880, the eleven tradesmen sketched are The Tailor; the Chemist; the Butcher; the Plumber; the Horse Dealer; the Publican; the Fishmonger; the Greengrocer; the Wine-Merchant; the Coal-Merchant and the Haberdasher. Trollope was renewing his connection with a newspaper which had last published him in the 1860s, and these are among his best essays, giving vivid snapshots of livelihoods almost invisible within Victorian fiction. They also tell us a great deal about shopping in London, about Trollope's own sensibilities, and his prejudices. The author on the best sort of wine merchant: 'to dine with him is, according to our ideas, the acme of human bliss'). We also get an idea of his hatred of modern advertising, and his superb sense irony, as seen in the essay on Plumbers, whom he calls 'sullen and dishonest'.; it is doubtful, he says, whether many plumbers go to heaven: perhaps as many as government officials.

Publication Price :£22.00 / $44*