ABSTRACT
A nthony Trollope was a living writing machine when he turned out The Last Chronicle of Barset in 1866, putting on paper a thousand words an hour for three-and-a-half hours every day. He got up at five in the morning, corrected the previous day’s work from five-thirty to six, then wrote from six to nine-thirty. Afterward he had breakfast and went to his job with the British postal service, where he occupied one of the highest offices. At five he usually retired to the Garrick Club for a rubber of whist or a game of billiards. Unlike other postal officials, he took two days a week off to go hunting. This little idiosyncrasy was tolerated because of his eminence as an author and his unquestioned value to the post office as a civil servant. Records establish that it was he who invented the mailbox, a fact hard to credit because of our tendency to think that such a simple device didn’t need inventing but always existed.
