Apart from his vast body of writing, Anthony Trollope is probably now best known for one of his innovations as a Post Office official – the introduction of pillar boxes in Britain and Ireland.
These have been especially useful in this country, where along with their basic duty, they have also played an important psychological role. Repainted green, they became one of the most visible indicators of independence. Even today, when travelling in Border areas, you often won’t know which state you’re in until you see the colour of the postboxes.
There’s a certain aptness in this because the writer himself, who was born 200 years ago this April, bestrode the Irish Sea in a manner that has left both countries with strong claims to his ownership.
He was a native Englishman, and lived there for his first quarter-century. But his early life was miserable. Whereas, from the moment he set foot in Ireland, as a young postal worker, his fortunes changed.
He would in later years marvel that his Irish hosts “did not murder me, nor did they even break my head”. And if he exaggerated his fears, there may indeed have been some forbearance on the part of locals. This was the 1840s, after all. Yet repainted green, as it were, Trollope’s careers both postal and literary took off at that time, and never looked back.
Another of his professional innovations was to impose a standard, 16-mile daily delivery route for postmen. This may have been less popular, at least with those who had to walk it. Trollope’s country routes made extensive use of shortcuts across fields, and having measured them on horseback, he later admitted he may have underestimated the effort involved.
Either way, it was during his own cross-country rambles that Trollope found a literary voice. Where Irish writers of the era followed a well-beaten track to London in search of fame, he did it in reverse, and then some. The muse descended in Leitrim, of all places, where a desolate scene near Drumsna inspired the setting of his debut novel, published in, of all years, 1847.
In the 1850s, as his stock rose back home, the Irish themes of his early work proved less popular than the English ones that became the norm. Even so, and despite returning to England in 1859, he never quite shook this country off. One of his popular later characters was Phineas Finn, a Clare-born MP. And in his last, unfinished work, The Land Leaguers, Trollope returned to Ireland both physically – for the research – and in theme.
I mentioned the “muse” earlier, and muses were indeed a popular concept among Victorian writers. But Trollope was ahead of his time in not relying on such supernatural inspiration. He worked to a strict routine, employing an assistant (human) to wake him at 5am daily, whereafter he started writing whether the muse was up or not.
This workmanlike reputation probably contributed to his fall from fashion in late Victorian times, as did the sheer size of his output. There was certainly a lot of him by then – 47 novels, many far from slim. And despite a big revival of interest in the past 30 years, he also presents problems for modern readers, used to pacier narratives.
But he’s still read today in part because he had such a profound understanding of the role of money in human affairs. His French contemporary, Balzac, is also famous for depicting the economic basis of all things. Yet, as WH Auden said, compared with Trollope, even Balzac was a romantic.
Thus what many consider Trollope's greatest novel, The Way We Live Now. Its title sounds strangely modern, and so it should. The book was inspired by the "Panic of 1873", an international financial crisis caused be reckless investment in railways, but also featuring what we would today call subprime mortgage lending. The effects lasted 20 years.
Among the Irish events to mark to bicentenary will be the publication of a book by John McCourt. And although organisers of the Trollope Summer School in Drumsna are taking a sabbatical this year in favour of travelling to the main celebrations, in London, there will be at least one important local contribution to ceremonies.
Next month, Britain’s Trollope Society plans to release red balloons from various places associated with him, with vouchers attached entitling the finders to a free book. This distributive gesture has a nice echo of Trollope’s postal career. So I’m glad to hear that Drumsna will be getting a red balloon for release too. But maybe, just for fun, they should repaint it.
@FrankmcnallyIT