Anthony Trollope was born at 16 Keppel Street in London

BIOGRAPHY

Anthony Trollope was born at 16 Keppel Street in London. He was the fifth of seven children. His father, Thomas Anthony, was a fellow of New College, Oxford, who failed both as a lawyer and as a farmer. The family's poverty made Trollope miserable at the rigid public social hierarchy in Harrow and Winchester. "It is hard to think of any good writer who had as wretched a time and had to endure it for so long," C. P. Snow wrote in Trollope (1975). Sometimes his parents could not afford to pay their son's school fees. After financial troubles, the family moved to Belgium, where Trollope's father died, broken-hearted and ill.

Trollope joined at the age of 19 the post office, where he worked as a clerk. In 1841, at the age of 26, he became a postal surveyor in Ireland. Trollope spent in this work for 33 years and used later his experiences in many novels. After marrying Rose Heseltine in 1844, Trollope set up a house at Clonmel and started his literary career. Soon after marrying Trollope began writing his spare time to earn extra money. He also began to speculate about the health of his wife and wrote to Miss Dorothea Sankey, another Irish woman of his acquaintance: "Should anything happen to her, will you supply her place-as soon as a proper period of decent mourning is over?" Eventually Rose Heseltine outlived her husband.

On Post Office business Trollope travelled in Egypt (1858), the West Indies (1858-59), and the United States (1861-62, 1868). "The marine people - the captain and his satellites-are bound to provide me; and all that they have provided is yams, salt pork, biscuit, and bad coffee," complained Trollope on his ocean voyage to Cuba in 1859. "I should be starved but for the small ham-would that it had been a large one-which I thoughtfully purchased in Kingston..." (from The West Indies and the Spanish Main, 1859). By the end of his professional career Trollope had became a successful civil servant. Among his achievements is the introduction of the red British mail boxes for letters, known as pillar-boxes. Before the mailboxes one had to go to the Post Office to mail a letter.

In 1859 he moved back to London and resigned from the civil service in 1867. His election campaign as a Liberal parliamentary candidate was unsuccessful, but about 1869 Trollope began his creative late period, publishing psychological and sharply satirical novels. Between the years 1867 and 1870 he edited the St Paul's Magazine. In 1871-72 he travelled in Australia and New Zealand, again in Australia in 1875, and in South Africa in 1877.

Trollope published some 40 novels, short stories, travel books, and essays. As a writer his work continued in more realistic vein the literary tradition on William Thackeray, of whom he wrote a study in 1879. Trollope lived in London from 1872 and at Harting Grange, Sussex, until 1882. He had a private library of 5,000 volumes, which was dearer to him "even than the horses." Trollope died in London on December 6, 1882. His last novel, MR. SCARBOROUGH'S FAMILY, was published posthumously in 1883. During the Second World War Trollope's novels were read primarily as romances but from the 1970s, critical revaluation of the author's contribution to the history of the novel has taken place, and Trollope's reputation as a moralist has risen greatly. However, still in the 1990s, his works were dismissed in the London Sunday Telegraph as overrated and flat.

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