ABSTRACT
Reading Anthony Trollope, especially his Autobiography, involves an exercise in enumeration. Following his own practice in that book, one can list his forty-seven novels, most of them in three volumes, and his sixteen other books; one may note that his sales sometimes topped 100,000; or count the words (425,000) of The Way We Live Now, “probably the longest of his works” (Sutherland 1982:vii). In An Autobiography one discovers the exact sum he received for each book published, and is given the grand total, down to the penny, that he earned from those books-£68,939.17.5; and there, too, one reads an account of his mode of production, written he says, “for the benefit of those who may read these pages, and when young may intend to follow the same career” (Trollope [1883]: 1947:303): to rise every morning in whatever circumstance at 5:30 and to work for three hours; more precisely, after reading over what had been written the day before, “to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour,” thus “produc[ing] over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day” (22728). This general scheme is further specified:
According to the circumstances of the time,—whether my other business might be then heavy or light, or whether the book which I was writing was or was not wanted with speed,—I have allotted myself so many pages a week. The average number has been about 40. It has been placed as low as 20, and has risen to 112. And as a page is an ambiguous term, my page has been made to contain 250 words; and as words, if not watched, will have a tendency to straggle, I have had every word counted as I went.
