Trollope and the Saturday Review

Abstract

l7ROLLOPE had his own opinion about reviewers, which he expressed in the Autobiography, saying that is, of course criticism and criticism;' and there has long been criticism about criticism, so that the subject of Trollope and the Saturday Review is not new. As a result, I must try to pass swiftly over some familiar territory, making grateful reference to David Skilton's Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries (1972), Trollope: The Critical Heritage, edited by Donald Smalley (1969), and Merle Bevington's The Saturday Review, 1855-1868 (1941). The Saturday Review's series of about sixty full reviews and articles on Trollope is an extraordinary one, running from Barchester Towers (30 May 1857) to An Old Man's Love (29 March 1884),2 and these remarks are intended as an addition to what has been said before. It would be hard to find an equal record; and it may have arisen from an affinity between them, which we can see in the way the Saturday Review speaks of Trollope and in which Bevington characterizes the periodicalat least at the time when it began. The idea of both was to be liberally conservative (Autobiography, p.