ABSTRACT
Commonplace, ordinary, everyday: affirmations of a remarkable realism have been a perfunctory refrain in Trollope criticism since it began. Laudatory reviews appraise the unaffected honesty, fidelity, and observation manifest in his “exceedingly truthful” fictions: 1 the Saturday Review appreciates his “unerring truth, tact, and liveliness”; 2 the Examiner characteristically appreciates his prosy “literalness.” 3 The derogatory vein of critique meanwhile regrets Trollope’s lack of striking originality: the Westminster Review snubs his “homely and prosaic . . . ordinary level of humdrum humanity”; 4 and Thomas Carlyle more derisively declares him “irredeemably imbedded in the commonplace, and grown fat upon it” (Hall Trollope: A Biography , 95). Thus, while Trollope’s acclaimed everydayness has evidenced his unpretentious sincerity and exacting mimesis, it has likewise belied the very fictionality of his work, as if he lacked the creativity to produce the definitive gap between reality and representation, as if his fictions were artless facts. If critics have routinely found Trollope’s novels pleasurable, they have done so even as they have denied them style, depth, and originality.
