Anthony Trollope Biography Quotes 55 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Anthony Trollope was born in London in 1815 into a family whose fortunes rose and fell with alarming speed. His father, Thomas Anthony Trollope, was a barrister of learning but little worldly success, and his disappointments brought the household years of uncertainty and debt. By contrast, his mother, Frances (Fanny) Trollope, displayed robust energy and talent, turning to writing to keep the family afloat; her widely read Domestic Manners of the Americans helped salvage their finances and made her a literary figure in her own right. The household was crowded with siblings, among them his elder brother Thomas Adolphus Trollope, who also became a prolific author and a close intellectual companion. Early exposure to the crosscurrents of failure and resilience left Anthony with a lifelong respect for steady work, social observation, and the quiet heroism of ordinary people.

Education and Early Struggles
Trollope's schooling at prestigious institutions, including Harrow and Winchester, did not bring him the ease or distinction one might expect. He later recalled his schooldays as unhappy, marked by financial embarrassment and bullying. University never followed. Instead, the urgent need for employment steered him toward public service. These early trials cultivated in him a candor and sturdiness evident in his fiction, where status, money, and character collide in ways he knew from experience.

The Post Office Career
In 1834 he entered the British General Post Office, the institution that became both his livelihood and, indirectly, his creative springboard. Beginning as a lowly clerk, he was eventually posted to Ireland, where he found a professional niche as a postal surveyor. The work demanded stamina: long rides across rough country, punctuality, and careful attention to logistics. Trollope embraced it, reorganizing routes and schedules and developing a reputation for practical efficiency. During this period he also helped advocate for and implement roadside letter boxes, first in the Channel Islands and then more widely, a small but transformative step in everyday British life. The discipline of official routine and the window onto provincial society that his inspections afforded fed directly into his fictional worlds.

Marriage and Personal Life
While in Ireland, Trollope married Rose, a steadying presence who encouraged his ambitions and shared the burdens of a life built on regular work and modest comforts. They had two children, and family life provided the stable framework within which his writing flourished. Hunting remained his chief outdoor passion; the rhythms of the hunt, the camaraderie of the field, and the minutiae of rural society would animate the pages of several novels.

Becoming a Novelist
Trollope began writing on the margins of his postal duties, teaching himself to compose before dawn, counting the minutes and the words. A timepiece on the desk, a set number of pages before breakfast, and a willingness to begin the next book the day after finishing the last formed the method that he would later describe with disarming frankness in An Autobiography, published after his death. The breakthrough came with The Warden (1855), the first of the Barsetshire novels. With Barchester Towers (1857), Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, and The Last Chronicle of Barset, he refined a fictional county and a circle of clerics, gentry, and professionals through which he explored conscience, duty, humor, and compromise.

Publishers, Editors, and Fellow Writers
Serial publication brought Trollope into the orbit of leading Victorian editors and publishers. William Makepeace Thackeray, first editor of the Cornhill Magazine, welcomed his work and helped introduce him to a large middle-class audience; the collaboration was enhanced by illustrations from John Everett Millais, whose drawings became part of the reading experience. The publisher George Smith proved another key ally, handling major serials and volumes with keen commercial sense. Trollope also engaged critically and personally with contemporaries such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot, measuring his realism against their styles and readerships. He admired their achievements even as he staked out a more domestic, institutional, and procedural terrain for the English novel.

Major Works and Themes
Alongside Barsetshire, Trollope built a second great sequence, the Palliser novels, centering on Plantagenet Palliser and Lady Glencora and tracing the entanglement of love, money, and parliamentary ambition. Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, and The Duke's Children survey politics not as grand spectacle but as a profession populated by men and women with competing loyalties. Single-volume triumphs include Orley Farm, with its intricate legal scandal; He Knew He Was Right, a somber anatomy of jealousy; and The Way We Live Now, a scathing panorama of speculation, journalism, and social hunger. His travel books and essays, including reports on North America and the colonies, showed the same appetite for practical detail and comparative judgment that marked his fiction.

Work Habits and Artistic Credo
Trollope's method became famous: early rising, fixed quotas, meticulous ledgers of words per quarter-hour. He defended professional regularity as the surest ally of imagination. To him, invention prospered under routine, and art did not require the trappings of inspiration so much as the discipline to sit and write. This candor drew criticism when An Autobiography revealed how deliberately he balanced art and livelihood; some readers felt disenchanted by talk of schedules and payments. Yet his openness clarified a modern idea of authorship: that the novel could be both a high craft and a respectable trade.

Public Life and Later Career
In 1867 he left the Post Office to write full time. A year later he stood for Parliament as a Liberal candidate at Beverley, an experience that confirmed his distaste for electoral corruption and gave him fresh material for political fiction. The bid failed, but his literary productivity did not. He continued to publish novels, biographies, and journalism, and he traveled widely, turning journeys into essays that balanced curiosity with lucid common sense. Through these decades his wife Rose remained his anchor, and his brother Thomas Adolphus offered a familial literary counterpoint as they compared notes across genres and continents.

Final Years and Legacy
Trollope died in London in 1882, leaving behind a shelf of novels whose vitality shows little sign of dimming. He is now recognized as one of the most capacious realists of the Victorian age, a novelist of institutions and communities as much as individuals. He excelled at charting the mesh of habit, ambition, and duty within parishes, clubs, counting houses, and parliamentary benches, granting to minor characters the dignity of plausible motives and to major figures the restraints of circumstance. His mother Frances had once written with fierce clarity about another society; he, in turn, wrote with steadiness about his own, and in doing so helped readers understand how a nation operates at the level of everyday life. From the quiet reforms he supported in the Post Office to the enduring panoramas of Barsetshire and Westminster, Trollope joined practicality to imagination, leaving a body of work that continues to reward attention for its humanity, shrewdness, and inexhaustible interest in how people manage to live together.

Our collection contains 55 quotes who is written by Anthony, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Wisdom - Truth - Love.

Other people realated to Anthony: Ronald Knox (Theologian), Simon Raven (Novelist), Joanna Trollope (Novelist), Susan Hampshire (Actress), Louis Auchincloss (Novelist), James Payn (Novelist)

• 1867 The Last Chronicle of Barset (Novel)
• 1864 The Small House at Allington (Novel)
• 1861 Framley Parsonage (Novel)
• 1858 Doctor Thorne (Novel)
• 1857 Barchester Towers (Novel)
• 1855 The Warden (Novel)

• Wikipedia