ABSTRACT
Anthony Trollope’s wife, Rose, complained that she wished her husband was not a writer. But her frustration was really that Trollope wrote too much: “He never leaves off, and he always has two packages of manuscript in his desk, besides the one he’s working on, and the one that’s being published” (Hawthorne, 227). Of all the ways in which Trollope’s literary contemporaries might have irritated their marital partners, few could have plagued them with such industry as Trollope demonstrated. Over the course of his career, Trollope produced forty-seven novels, forty-four short stories, five works of travel writing, three biographies, four privately printed lectures, four collections of ‘Sketches’, two plays, a Commentary on Caesar’s Commentaries , one book of social criticism and his Autobiography – and countless essays and reviews. 1 He also had a full-time and, in due course, high-ranking position at the Post Office for thirty-three years, co-founded The Fortnightly Review and for three years edited Saint Paul’s Magazine . By anyone’s standards, this productivity is exceptional. It certainly seemed so to his contemporaries. At a lunch party hosted by George Eliot and her partner, G. H. Lewes, “Trollope described writing every morning at 5:30 for three hours, with his watch on his desk, pushing on with his 250 words every quarter of an hour.” George Eliot ‘positively quivered’ with dismay, volunteering that “there were days on end when she could not write a line”. Trollope, rather generously, informed her that “with imaginative work like yours that is quite natural; but with my mechanical stuff it’s a sheer matter of industry. It’s not the head that does it – it’s the cobbler’s wax on the seat and the sticking to my chair!” (Hall, 63).
