ABSTRACT
Anthony Trollope understood more keenly than most the complexities of the globalizing world in the nineteenth century. An inveterate world traveller with a special interest in emerging media and communications, he wrote four detailed travel books which come out of lengthy trips abroad – The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1859), North America (1862), Australia and New Zealand (1873) and South Africa (1878) – in addition to numerous stories, some collected as Tales of All Countries (1861 and 1863). His travels were no less absorbed into his novels, some of which were set entirely in foreign lands (Prague, Nuremburg, Australia) or in which settings abroad are particularly significant – think of Mexico in The Way We Live Now (1875) or Australia in John Caldigate (1877). As one of the bestselling novelists of his day, Trollope’s work was, of course, widely disseminated across the globe, ensuring that on his travels, he was received as a globetrotting literary celebrity. Often travelling as a government official, in his capacity as high-ranking civil servant in the General Post Office, he helped negotiate treaties related to communications routes in the service of an expanding empire. He observed, experienced and wrote about the rapid expansion of transnational networks and routes – of railway and steamship, post and telegraph, publishing centres and satellites. Trollope is, as David Skilton has recently suggested, the most recognizably ‘modern’ of Victorian writers. 1
Trollope’s critics have long appreciated the significance of his travelling to understanding both the man and his fiction. Michael Sadleir’s pioneering Trollope: A Commentary (1927) notes that Frances Trollope ‘handed on the travel-habit to her younger son,’ who later honed the skill ‘of using an official journey as a means to sightseeing, and sightseeing as a means to authorship.’ 2 Bradford Booth writes of Trollope the travel writer that
With the doggedness of the professional researcher he pursued the tangible and the intangible constituents of a foreign culture, putting poet and peasant, as well as commerce and industry, under glass for the satisfaction of his insatiable curiosity. He was a statistical Baedeker bulling his way over a strange terrain, notebook in hand, with one eye cocked, businesslike, on the economic condition of the people, while the other, that of the novelist, detected their individual and collective foibles. 3
More recent critics have emphasized more recent concerns, particularly around questions of empire and colonialism. In this volume, essays by Gordon Bigelow, Robert Tracy, Nicholas Birns,
Tamara Wagner and Grace Moore all shed new light on Trollope’s engagement with Ireland and Australia, building on a range of extant scholarship. 4
As Daniel Headrick, David Henkin, Richard Menke and others have recently shown, the first half of the nineteenth century marked a turning point in global communications, with the development of the railway, the penny post and the telegraph, which established the nodes on the networks of global movement, whether in terms of tourist destinations, publishing and other cultural ‘centres,’ or economic and commercial hubs. 5 Of course, such work requires close attention to imperialism and colonialism of various kinds, and the speed of these modernizing forces was uneven and often uncertain, bringing into sharp relief questions related to local, national and other forms of identity. As Ian Baucom has observed, ‘the task of “locating” English identity became ever more complex as England struggled to define the relationship between the national “here” and the imperial “there.”’ 6 For Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, the fraught realities of this globalized world require us to be attentive to the ‘circuits of relation within modernity,’ the ways people and texts are embedded within various circuits of communication, and to the ‘local-global dialectic of inside and outside, belonging and exile, in ways that disrupt conventional poetics.’ 7 David Skilton has observed that Trollope’s characters are almost always creatures of the urgent present of global modernity:
Trollope’s are among the first fictional characters to live lives controlled by rapid and efficient communications. Like their author, many of them are tireless train and steamship travellers in the British Isles and abroad, they exploit the penny post, and as soon as the telegraph is available, they use that too. While Dickens and Thackeray preferred to set their novels in the past, Trollope’s seemed to their contemporary readers as up-tothe-minute as the latest topical cartoon in Punch . 8
Living in the present, alive to global transformations, is not always an easy place to be. Given Trollope’s own experiences of the circuits of modernity (as tourist, government official and global literary celebrity), it is no surprise that his work is frequently concerned with questions of distance and proximity, borders and boundaries – whether those boundaries are in Barsetshire or the outback. In Trollope’s fiction, the ‘inside’ is always aware of the ‘outside,’ the ‘local’ not far from the ‘global.’
