The Last Chronicle of Barset Read Free Page B

Westerners. It was a sort of civilizing plan on a domestic scale; the goods to be sold were, as Trollope writes, ‘little goods such as pincushions, pepper-boxes, and pocket-knives’. 7 After some time, Trollope’s father and remaining brother joined the rest of the family in Cincinnati, leaving Anthony the only family member in England. He was at school at Winchester, but his father had left without paying his fees. At the age of twelve he was left alone in England with no money or family, and was only kept at the school on sufferance, a social pariah. Eventually his father returned, but the following years were marked by further humiliations as he lived with his ill and depressed parent in a tumble-down farmhouse, walking miles to Harrow as a day-boarder at the school, sitting in muddy, disordered clothes with the wealthy sons of the aristocracy and trade. In America, the Cincinnatians were unimpressed by the civilizing effects of English pincushions, and the bazaar failed. But Trollope’s mother returned from the USA in 1831 with an immediate bestseller,
Domestic Manners of the Americans
, and with this saved her family from poverty and inaugurated her career as a successful and prolific writer.
    While the early hours of writing that were so important to Trollope may have reassured him that he was ‘fit for a man’s work’, it was his mother who gave him the model for this regime. Through the disturbances of bankruptcy and a flight to Belgium to avoid debtors, while moving from home to home, and while nursing several dying children and a dying husband, Frances Trollope kept writing beforethe household was awake so that her family could live. Trollope’s writing is dogged by these experiences, and when he is able to divide the Crawleys’ annual income with such meticulous accounting as ‘three pounds of meat a day, at ninepence a pound, will cost over forty pounds a year’ (Ch. 4 ) he reveals the fear of poverty which is at the foundation of his lists of profits in his autobiography. These accounts of publishing profits have amazed and distressed readers who expect a more romantic account of a writer’s life, but for Trollope they were magical figures which kept fear and shame at bay.
    When Trollope was nineteen his mother obtained for him the position of junior clerk in the newly established General Post Office. He got into a little debt and made a bad impression at his work. It was not until he applied for and got the job (that no one else seemed to want) of postal surveyor’s clerk in Ireland that his life changed. Trollope spent sixteen happy years in Ireland, during which he became respected in his postal career, married and had two sons, and wrote his first novels. By the time he returned to England in 1859, he had become one of the most popular novelists of the day.
    While writing
The Last Chronicle
he was coming to the decision to leave his job at the Post Office. He was now fifty-one. In his long civil service to the GPO he had contributed significantly to one of the many great eighteenth-and nineteenth-century institutions and inventions (such as Brunel’s bridges and ships, canals, macamadized roads, the railways and the telegraph) which created an infrastructure and networks of communication across Britain, and indeed over much of the world. These networks were tremendously important to Trollope. In the early 1850s he was asked to extend and ensure the delivery of letters to rural Ireland and then over a large part of Britain, and he later wrote that, ‘during those two years it was the ambition of my life to cover the country with rural Letter Carriers’. 8 To him is credited the establishment of the pillar box in Britain, and he worked tirelessly so that letters should be delivered reliably and free of charge ‘to the public in little villages’. 9 Later he travelled to Egypt, the USA, the West Indies and Cuba, among other places, to