Love Quote by Anthony Trollope

Trollope treats romance the way a sensible Victorian treats perfume: pleasant in small doses, suspicious in large ones. The joke lands on the phrase "just a sniff" - a deliberately deflating measurement for what novels are supposedly built on. "Rocks and valleys" gives romance a landscape painter's grandeur, the kind of scenery that promises transcendence. Then he punctures it with "bread-and-cheese", a phrase so plain it almost crunches. That collision is the point: Trollope is not anti-romance, he's anti-romance-as-substitute-for-life.

The intent is aesthetic and moral at once. He wants the frisson of the dramatic - the picturesque, the heightened feeling, the sense of being swept somewhere larger than the parlor. But he insists that such atmosphere only matters if the fundamentals are secure: food, money, duty, the daily labor of getting on with people. In Trollope's world, love stories don't float above economics; they ride on it. The subtext is a critique of both literary melodrama and social self-deception: the people who chase "rocks and valleys" without "bread-and-cheese" are chasing a story that cannot sustain them.

Contextually, this is Victorian realism defending its turf. Trollope wrote amid a marketplace hungry for sensation, while Britain itself was reorganizing life around work, respectability, and material stability. His wit isn't merely curmudgeonly; it's a craft statement. Give the reader a taste of romance, sure - but build the novel, and the life inside it, on what actually keeps you standing.