Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope wrote forty-seven novels before breakfast, invented the British pillar box, and destroyed his own reputation by admitting how the work was done. His childhood was wretched - a failing barrister father, debts, a scholarship boy at Harrow and Winchester among the sons of gentlemen, and a mother who saved the family by writing travel books and novels in her fifties. He took a clerkship in the Post Office, was sent to Ireland at twenty-six, and there became competent and happy for the first time. He stayed with the Post Office for thirty-three years while writing, surveying postal routes across Ireland, England, Egypt and the West Indies, and introducing the roadside letter box to Britain. The Barsetshire novels made him: a cathedral town observed with enormous patience and no melodrama, where the plots turn on livings, engagements and who will be warden. The Palliser series does the same for politics. His method was two hundred and fifty words every fifteen minutes by the watch, before the office; when he said so in his posthumous autobiography, critics decided he was a tradesman and his standing collapsed for fifty years. He wrote The Warden after walking round Salisbury cathedral close one evening and working out the plot on the spot. He stood unsuccessfully for parliament at Beverley in 1868 and described the experience as the most wretched fortnight of his life; the constituency was disenfranchised for corruption shortly afterwards. The Way We Live Now, written after a long absence abroad, is a furious book about financial fraud and is now the most read of his later novels. Henry James disliked him in print and admired him privately. His reputation recovered from the 1940s and has not slipped since.

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