Anthony Trollope's Apprenticeship

Abstract

g-]sLLOPE S EARLIEST NOVELS have received comparatively little critical attention beyond brief summaries and apologetic dismissals. Nor, in terms of their novelistic merits, is there reason to spend much time examining them. Had Trollope written nothing but The Macdermots of Ballycloran, The Kellys and the O'Kellys, and La Vendee, he would not have earned mention as even a minor novelist of the nineteenth century. But when one is concerned with the nature of his total achievement as a major writer of fiction, those early books are worth considerable attention for the insight they yield into the development of the finished novelist. More specifically than most original novelists, Trollope can be seen to have served an apprenticeship to his predecessors, during which he imitated subject matter, points of view, verbal style, and even idiosyncratic techniques. Ultimately, Trollope emerges as a genuinely original writer who significantly broadened the scope of the novel, but in his early work he appears, at least superficially, to be the most derivative of writers. As he tries out the subjects, voices, and styles of Edgeworth, Carleton, Scott, Austen, Dickens, Fielding, and others, Trollope discovers what will not work for him and in the process achieves insight into what will work. Unlike Edgeworth, he cannot chronicle misery and yet remain outside it, comforted by a romantic view of the basic goodness of the peasant mind and heart; and, unlike