Anthony Trollope, The Novel Machine
THE CHRONICLER OF BARSETSHIRE A Life of Anthony Trollope By R.H. Super University of Michigan Press. 528 pp. $35</br></br>THE CHRONICLER OF BARSETSHIRE A Life of Anthony Trollope By R.H. Super University of Michigan Press. 528 pp. $35 "FAVOURED BY practice and original endowment," said an anonymous critic in England's Saturday Review, Anthony Trollope "can write novels as easily as a hen lays eggs." He wrote 47 of them in just under four decades, and in the bumper year of 1864 polished off half of one long novel and all of two medium-length ones, a total of more than half-a-million words. He managed the prodigious output of that and many other years while acting as a husband, father, and full-time bureaucrat in the British Post Office-a job he performed with distinction. One secret of his productivity came to light when Thackeray's daughter spent a few days chez Trollope: "She was astonished to hear Trollope called by the servant every morning at four to take up his writing task for the day."</br></br>His father was a feckless barrister who moved the family to Harrow so that Anthony and his brothers could attend the prestigious parish school as day-boys without charge. After bailiffs seized the family's belongings for nonpayment of debts, Anthony's mother embarked on a writing career. In addition to novels she wrote a travel book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, which took the pulse of Yankee culture and found it erratic. The book made her career and restored the family's position.</br></br>Nonetheless, Anthony skipped university and entered civil service because, he later allowed, "an early income was desirable." He married, rose slowly in the ranks, and published a few novels with indifferent success. It was in his fifth book, Barchester Towers, in which he blended his satirical gifts with disdain for evangelical puritanism, that he found himself. There he introduced Mrs. Proudie, wife of the bishop of Barsetshire and wearer of the episcopal pants, the first of his peerless termagants. He wrote five other novels set in the mythical county of Barsetshire; in The Last Chronicle of Barset-from which R.H. Super takes the title of this admirable biography, one that stands out from other lives of Trollope by not taking his Autobiography at face value-he made sport of his dual careers by having Mrs. Proudie campaign to ban mail delivery on The Lord's Day.</br></br>He also wrote a six-volume series of "Parliamentary" novels centered on that reluctant prime minister, Plantaganet Palliser, the eventual Duke of Omnium-an achievement that pundits as disparate as George Will and Anthony Lewis have commended in their columns. Trollope's non-ecclesiastical, non-parliamentary novels tend to be about nothing more momentous than the ethics of inheritance, courtship and marriage, and some readers revere him exactly for this Austenite strain.