All this time he was steadily writing fiction. The first of his books to bring him remuneration was The Three Clerks (1858), a poor novel of the Civil Service sold for £250. But before long, he tells us in the Autobiography, he was earning on the average £4,500 a year, and in one instance he received £3,525 for a single book. An enormous output-for, besides more than fifty novels he wrote much else, and believed that no writer had made a larger contribution to letters in an equal space of time was rendered possible by a methodical apportionment of the 24 hours. He rose regularly at 5.3o A.M., wrote steadily for two hours and a half, at the rate of 25o words every quarter of an hour, and thus calculated each book as so many days' work, which was carefully checked off as it proceeded. Yet he found leisure to hunt three times a week during the season, played whist daily, and had plenty of time for social enjoyments. He lived in London for about eight years (1872-8o), and then removed to the village of Harting, under the Sussex Downs. He was staying in town when he died of paralysis, Dec. 6, 1882.
Trollope was a big, bluff, vociferous person, whose blustering and overbearing ways offended some, but whose John Bull phil istinism did not conceal an essential honesty and good nature and a tender heart. He thought Pride and Prejudice the greatest novel in the language, and he idolized Thackeray ; but he was as far from the exquisite art of the one writer as from the perfect mastery and irony of the other. With perhaps too much fidelity to the usual and commonplace, he depicted the great middle class as it was in mid-Victorian times. He was a "character-monger" of first-rate quality, who showed his personages moving in their own little spheres, and as he widened his circle of characters took in a larger sweep until he embraced almost as large and diversified a world as that surveyed by Thackeray. Among the characters that stand out, along with the two or three already mentioned, Mr. Crawley, the grimly pathetic hero of The Last Chronicle of Barset, the wicked but delightful Signora Neroni, Lucy Robarts, the best of many admirable heroines (unless Lady Glencora be preferred to that place), her husband, Mr. Plantagenet Palliser,
afterwards Duke of Omnium, Lady Lufton, and that shrewd and downright person Miss Dunstable, with such different examples of the unattractive in life turned to artistic account as Mr. Sowerby and Mr. Chaffanbrass-these make a notable gallery and are only a selection from the catalogue. Other characters show uncertainty of touch and a failure of motivation. Trollope was best at a sort of coarse or at any rate very broad comedy, but he also had a command of real pathos. Tragedy was outside his scope. He revelled in mankind's idiosyncrasies, but shirked the closer scru tiny into the byways of conscience, just as he was shy of the spiritual questions which must, surely, have played some part in the lives of his clerical personages. George Eliot, his contempo rary, would have dealt with Mr. Harding and Mr. Crawley in a totally different way.
Besides The Warden and Barchester Towers, the Barchester series comprises:-Dr. Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1864), The Small House at Allington (1864), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). The best of Trollope outside that series, besides such as are named above, are probably Orley Farm (1862), Can You Forgive Her (1864), Phineas Finn (1869) and its sequel Phineas Redux (1874), The Claverings (1867), The Belton Estate (1866), He Knew He was Right (1869), The Vicar of Bullhampton (187o), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), The Way We Live Now (1875), The American Senator (1877), The Duke's Children (188o), Ayala's Angel (1881) and Mr. Scarborough's Family (1883). Trollope's Autobiography was edited by his son (1883). The best biography is T. H. S. Escott's Anthony Trollope, His Work, Associates and Literary Originals (um) which may be supplemented by Michael Sadleir's Trollope, a Com mentary (1927), H. Walpole's Trollope ("English Men of Letters," 1928), Leslie Stephen's Studies of a Biographer, IV. (1902), Henry James's Partial Portraits (i888), and Professor Saintsbury's "Trollope Revisited" (Essays and Studies by members of the English Association,