Anthony Trollope: The Way We Live Now

Anthony Trollope always comes up in a discussion of the nineteenth century novelists, but he seems to be a second-tier writer, maybe because he was so dauntingly prolific, having produced a novel or five every year, from the late 1840s to the early 1880s.

I'm exaggerating, but only a little bit. He really hit his stride in the mid-1850s, when he began churning them out like clockwork. And he did publish five books in 1882, but that number includes three novels, a biography, and a short story collection. Typically, he published between 1 to 3 books a year, and that does add up over the course of a thirty year career, and is all the more astounding because the man had a day job at the post office. (I hear he was responsible for an iconic post box colour/design used throughout England.)

Trollope's The Way We Live Now may seem inaccessible at first because it looks like a typical Victorian door stop. I quite liked it, though. What really struck me, after reading a similarly mammoth Dickens novel (Our Mutual Friend) was that Trollope doesn't contrive the hell out of his plot the way that Dickens does. There were coincidences, maybe, but a lot of them are attributable to the characters living in the same places or running in the same circles, and none of them were outrageous, or required a sudden abandonment of a long-established characterization. The narrator was much more snide than the typical Dickens narrator, and Trollope's book has characters that aren't out and out villains, but are just kind of worthless and irritating.

Recommended if you are interested in: Victorian satire, the Victorian financial world, Victorian perspectives on America, multi-family sagas, newspaper publishing in the mid-nineteenth century, country life vs. city life, low-level aristocracy, electioneering in Victorian England.