Parenting & Family Quote by Anthony Trollope

Trollope makes ambition sound like virtue with a pay stub: not merely admirable, but necessary, as essential as salt. The phrasing is deliberately expansive - "grand", "very salt of the earth", "parent of all enterprise" - a cascade of moral elevation that takes a private desire (to rise) and baptizes it as public good. It works because it flatters two audiences at once: the striver who wants permission to want more, and the respectable onlooker who prefers to see social climbing as "improvement" rather than hunger.

The subtext is Victorian Britain negotiating its own churn. Trollope wrote in a century when railways, finance, and the swelling professional class were rearranging status faster than old aristocratic scripts could keep up. "Rise in the world" is a polite euphemism for a brutal competition over jobs, reputations, marriages, and money - especially within the clerical, bureaucratic, and commercial milieus Trollope knew intimately (including his own career in the Post Office). By calling ambition the engine of "all improvement", he folds economic dynamism and social mobility into a single story of progress.

Still, the sentence has a tell: its confidence is too clean. Trollope is canny about the ways ambition corrodes character, makes people perform respectability, and turns institutions into ladders. Read against his novels, this sounds less like naive boosterism than a provocative thesis statement - the kind that forces you to notice the bargain underneath: a society that praises ambition because it needs it, then punishes its less tasteful forms.