Trollopiad

John Sutherland

• The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope by R.H. Super
  Manchester University Press, 528 pp, £29.95, July 1990, ISBN 0 472 10102 1
• Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in his World by Richard Mullen
  Duckworth, 767 pp, £25.00, July 1990, ISBN 0 7156 2293 5
• Trollope: A Biography by N. John Hall
  Oxford, 581 pp, £25.00, October 1991, ISBN 0 19 812627 1

Trollope is our most popular and reprinted Victorian novelist. His new companions in the Abbey – Dickens, George Eliot and Hardy – may sell more copies of individual novels, but they cannot match the expansiveness of Trollope’s appeal. Forty or more of his works are currently in print – some in as many as five different editions. But for a century, Trollopians have complained about the lack of a reliable life of their author. In response to this, three scholars, working independently of each other, set out in the Eighties to write the authoritative biography. None has had access to substantially better or more informative primary materials. In the last two years their massive volumes have been delivered. Is this a good thing, or too much of a good thing?