ABSTRACT
In 1851, looking to establish a comprehensive mail system, the British Post Office dispatched a struggling novelist to survey possible mail routes in rural Britain. Having gained expertise in such labor while in Ireland, Anthony Trollope dove headfirst into his English surveying. “It was the ambition of my life,” Trollope recollects, “to cover the country with rural letter-carriers” ( An Autobiography , ch. 5 ). An arduous task, extending the postal network into the provincial backwaters of the nation: riding forty miles a day and visiting every nook in western Britain, Trollope determined the length of carriers’ routes, arranged them to include as many hamlets and villages as possible, and calculated the cost-effectiveness of the potential route against the promised volume of mail (Super 21). Trollope’s account of his surveying highlights a set of protocols that will become critical to his fiction’s portrayal of the Victorian state. Trollope characterized his state position as that of a “beneficent angel” bringing a “more regular delivery of letters” to regions previously served in “an irregular manner” ( Autobiography , ch. 5 ). Surveying integrates otherwise isolated persons and locales into a comprehensive network. The state coordinates, but it does so through a paradoxical appearance. To gather information for new postal routes, Trollope had “to startle” inhabitants “into the revelations which I required them to make for their own good” ( Autobiography , ch. 5). Noticeable though he must be, Trollope nevertheless remains a mystery to rural Britons: “the angelic nature of my mission was imperfectly understood” because “I . . . did not allow as much time as was necessary to explain” it (ibid.). A conspicuous yet enigmatic outsider bringing order to a disordered nation: retrospectively, Trollope casts the postal surveyor as emblematic of the state as it had appeared in his fiction for nearly three decades.
