Why Trollope?

I’ve always felt warm, cozy, and comforted reading Trollope.  I know I’m in good hands.  While I probably won’t be totally blown away, I won’t be seriously disappointed either.  The novel will be long, it won’t have the Dickensian emotional climaxes that would make the book un-put-downable, and it will require a steady reading effort over a few weeks.  But there will be consistent human interest, many unexpected rewards along the way, a good deal of revealing historical context, and a satisfying conclusion. All in all, not a bad bargain, for me at least.

Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker piece notwithstanding, there seems to be little interest in Trollope’s novels these days. Perhaps I need to hide in Victorian obscurity or achieve some kind of status from reading a 'classy' author that my friends don’t read?  Nonetheless, every so often I need a dose of Trollope.  I’ve read maybe a dozen of his 47 novels, so thankfully I’m not going to run out any time soon.  If I ever come across a complete Trollope, I’ll buy it.  I own a complete Dickens and a complete Balzac.  I’d be tickled pink to add the quasi-obscure Trollope to that modest collection.

The six Palliser novels stand apart as a monument to Victorian political history.  I’d read the first three.  Time to move on to the fourth, Phineas Redux. 

I learned quite a bit about fox hunting, about anti-Semitism in 19^th-century Britain, about sexism, about Parliamentary politics, about London political newspapers.  I had the pleasure of renewing my acquaintances with some characters from the first three books in the series, and getting to know some new ones, some scrupulous, some not so much. I got to watch them act under stress and react to the opportunity for transformation.

Flawed?  Yes.  Your alternative?

Trollope’s strength is not setting or metaphor, not description or poetry, but rather a straightforward and seemingly (deceptively?) objective depiction of character: personal motivation conditioned by place in contemporary society.  Unlike Dickens, Trollope doesn’t openly advocate for a particular point of view (though his personal opinions are thinly veiled). Yet for each character it all makes sense from that particular (and particularly flawed) point of view.  Trollope’s most poignant passages are those in which he lays bare the personal and emotional forces which motivate each individual or group.  At their best these novels are sociological, political, and personal deconstructions. And the main characters are significantly transformed by the end.  Some are defeated.  Some triumph.  Most of the minor characters just go on as they were. Each of the major characters is marked in his own way by a combination of inherent makeup and socio-political context. While the major characters may not have the depth and contradictory traits we find in Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, they're not two-D Dickensian placard bearers either.  

Trollope is on my list of historical figures I’d most like to have dinner with.  Had to be a great conversationalist.  But maybe not.  He worked like an automaton (churning out novel after novel).  If he had enormous personal charm maybe he would have been distracted and lured into society and written less. I want to have dinner with the mind behind these characters and these plots, the mind behind those insights and that jaded but fascinating point of view.  It may be that the actual individual Trollope himself didn’t well represent that mind.  But he gave us that mind in his fiction.

Again, not a bad bargain.  I’m good.