Posted on 04/24/2015 9:14:16 AM PDT by Borges
Anthony Trollope may not, generally, be a staple part of people’s understanding of Victorian literature. He hasn’t fared quite as well as Dickens or Eliot. But seeing as he’s recently turned 200, and you may glimpse him on your stamps over breakfast soon enough, it seems like a good time to encourage you to read him.
Trollope wrote and published tirelessly. At his most popular in the 1860s, he dominated the literary scene as far as the prosperous middle-classes were concerned. Readers thought and wrote about his characters almost as though they were real people, and his was the picture of the life of the professional and landed classes which people recognized and believed in. Dickens, it is true, consistently sold more copies, having more readers from less well-off households. One might say that everyone who read Trollope also read Dickens, but that not all readers of Dickens were Trollope fans.
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Agreed. And the Barchester novels are a good place to start, although Barchester Towers is preceded by the first novel in the series, The Warden.
Trollop? Why are there so many threads on mattress girl today?
Oops. Missed the “E” on the end.
The Dickens you say!...................
I started with ‘The Warden’ and couldn’t stop reading...
I am still reading his books and re-reading some. It’s so much fun!
I recommend ‘The Way We Live Now’.
His book about his tour of the US during the Civil War is also most interesting. In 1862-3, he didn’t think the North would stick it out and win.
Didn’t the U.K. support the Confederacy?
Never openly. They built some warships for them, and at one point, after the Union seized two of their ambassadors, there were rumblings about them declaring war. But the Court of St. James's never formally received the ambassador from the CSA and he eventually returned home having accomplished nothing.
Is that so?
That is a complicated subject.
I recently read an interesting book on that, A World On Fire, by Amanda Foreman. It’s only about 900 pages, so feel free to read it and draw your own conclusions.
There was one Englishman who fought in the Confederate army, the US Army, and the US Navy. Now that’s what I call complicated!
He was amazing.
bfl
Didn’t the U.K. support the Confederacy?
...
They had lucrative ties to Big Cotton, and the Union feared that at some point they would enter the war, but they didn’t.
I have at least one of those ebooks but I found it pretty boring really
Do you like the fiction of that period?
some of it, maybe some of it just seems to be stretched out too long.
Life moved slower back then.
true!
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