The Changing World of Anthony Trollope

The Changing World of Anthony Trollope by Robert M. Polhemus. University of California Press, $6.00.

The critic who embarks on a study of Trollope faces two signal dangers: Trollope’s valuation of himself in the Autobiography, and the formidable bulk of his output. The first danger is not inconsiderable, for the picture of the plain blunt man is the half-truth which, though it does not really conceal the dreamer who imagined and told the tales, unfortunately dominates the self-portrait. With its memorably explicit recollections of assiduity at the writing table at home and abroad, the Autobiography has no doubt put off more readers than it has fetched; the critic’s job is to show not that Trollope was less prosaic than he claimed to be but that the texture of his work is richer than he admits—richer, perhaps, than he knew. This, however, is the lesser and the more ordinary of the two dangers, and one that, once recognized, can be the more readily dealt with.