Hunting Sketches

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) was born in London to a failed barrister and the prolific writer Frances Trollope, whose own success later supported the family; a poor and friendless schooling at Harrow and Winchester left him, by his own account, miserable. In 1834 he took a clerkship in the Post Office, and it was in that service — including a formative posting to Ireland and, in 1851–52, a tour of Britain to survey rural letter-receiving that led him to propose the roadside pillar box — that he spent thirty-three years, rising to a senior surveyorship before retiring in 1867. He wrote before office hours each morning to a fixed daily word quota, a working method he described frankly in his posthumously published Autobiography (1883), a candour about the mechanics of authorship that damaged his reputation with critics for a generation after his death. The Warden (1855) began the six Barsetshire novels, continued in Barchester Towers (1857) and completed by The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867); the six Palliser novels, beginning with Can You Forgive Her? (1864), followed the political and private lives of Plantagenet Palliser and Lady Glencora across parliamentary London. He died in London at sixty-seven, having published more than forty novels.