ABSTRACT

Trollope (1815–82) began his career as a novelist in 1847. The Warden is his first ‘Barsetshire’ novel; in extract (a), Mr Bold is reading the first number of The Almshouse, a novel by ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’ (i.e. Dickens) inspired by the current allegations about the misappropriation of ecclesiastical endowments, such as at the almshouse where Mr Harding is Warden. ‘It’s clear,’ Bold hears, ‘that Sentiment has been down to Barchester, and got up the whole story there…it’s very well done…his first numbers always are.’ (b) comes from St. Paul’s Magazine, of which Trollope was editor; (c) from the chapter ‘On English Novelists of the Present Day’, in the Autobiography, where he opens his survey: ‘I do not hesitate to name Thackeray the first’ (cf. his Thackeray [1879]). See also his ‘Novel-reading’, a review of Dickens’s and Thackeray’s Collected Works (Nineteenth Century, January 1879, v, 24–43; much of it used in Autobiography, Ch. xii). He there cites a happy anecdote to illustrate Dickens’s popularity: tradesmen had recently been making ‘freegift offers’ of books with certain purchases, and one tea-dealer had ordered 18000 volumes of Dickens; when the bookseller suggested some other novelties, the tea-dealer insisted that ‘Dickens was what he wanted. He had found that the tea-consuming public preferred their Dickens’ (v, 32–3). See Ernest Boll, ‘Infusions of Dickens in Trollope’, Trollopian, i (1946), 11–24.