ABSTRACT
Forty years ago, when I was writing about how Trollope’s contemporary critics received his fiction, I sought to discover not principally which books they liked and which they disliked (a preoccupation that reveals remarkably little about the works in question), but rather something about how they read, and what assumptions they brought to the act of reading fiction, regardless of whether the value judgments they then passed on the basis of these assumptions were favorable or unfavorable to the author’s sales prospects or self-esteem. One of the assumptions that I found shared by a good number of critics concerned the portrayal of fictional personages in works that they characterized as displaying what was then called “truth to life.” The test that was applied was whether authors presented an “inside” to their characters as well as a social, visible “outside.” The question had been largely unremarked by twentieth-century commentators, I discovered, because up to that date they largely shared the standards that these Victorian critics had handed down, and I found parallel assumptions not only among twentieth-century writers on Trollope, most notably David Cecil and Bradford A. Booth, but also in reviews of current fiction in the Times Literary Supplement.
