‘On English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement’

No man, I fancy, can work long at any trade without being brought to consider whether that which he is doing daily tends to evil or to good. All of you probably have asked yourself that question, and have answered it after some fashion....

Chapter 17 The American Postal Treaty—the Question of Copyright with America—Four More Novels

In the spring of 1868,—before the affair of Beverley, which, as being the first direct result of my resignation of office, has been brought in a little out of its turn,—I was requested to go over to the United States and make a postal...

Chapter 10 ‘The Small House at Allington’, ‘Can You Forgive Her?’, ‘Rachel Ray’, and The ‘Fortnightly Review’

During the early months of 1862 Orley Farm was still being brought out in numbers, and at the same time Brown, Jones, and Robinson was appearing in the Cornhill Magazine. In September 1862 The Small House at...

Chapter 2 My Mother

Though I do not wish in these pages to go back to the origin of all the Trollopes, I must say a few words of my mother,—partly because filial duty will not allow me to be silent as to a parent who made for...

Trollope on Jane Austen

Since the writing of Pepys’s Diary, Miss Austen has perhaps gone the nearest towards giving us a true insight into the houses of the people of her day. With Mr and Mrs Bennet and Lady Catherine de Burgh we are quite at home. With...

Chapter 18 ‘The Vicar of Bullhampton’—‘Sir Harry Hotspur’—‘An Editor’s Tales’—‘Cæsar’

In 1869 I was called on to decide, in council with my two boys and their mother, what should be their destination in life. In June of that year the elder, who was then twenty-three, was called to the Bar; and as he had...

Chapter 14 On Criticism

Literary criticism in the present day has become a profession,—but it has ceased to be an art. Its object is no longer that of proving that certain literary work is good and other literary work is bad, in accordance with rules which the critic...

Chapter 9 ‘Castle Richmond’, ‘Brown, Jones, and Robinson’, ‘North America’, ‘Orley Farm’

When I had half-finished Framley Parsonage, I went back to my other story, Castle Richmond, which I was writing for Messrs Chapman & Hall, and completed that. I think that this was the only occasion on which I have had...

From ‘The Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne’

There never surely was a powerful, active, continually effective mind less round, more lop-sided than that of nathaniel hawthorne. If there were aught of dispraise in this, it would not be said by me,—by an Englishman of an American whom I knew,...

Chapter 13 On English Novelists of the Present Day

In this chapter I will venture to name a few successful novelists of my own time, with whose works I am acquainted; and will endeavour to point whence their success has come, and why they have failed when there has been failure. I do not...