By SIMON HEFFER [The Telegraph] – When I was reading English at university 30 years ago, Trollope was simply not considered serious. This did not necessarily count against him. Cambridge in the late 1970s and early 1980s had some funny ideas about literature. To some writers it should have been a badge of honour to be denigrated, marginalised and reviled by the panjandrums of the English faculty. I recall the contempt in which Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H G Wells were held – for no better reason, it seemed, than that they had not been Virginia Woolf or D H Lawrence.
Woolf’s neurotic snobbery and Lawrence’s overwritten exhibitions of his own perversions soon started to seem infinitely less appealing, and interesting, than the sharp observations, imagination and wit of their unfashionable contemporaries. I recall one preposterous Leftist lecturer telling us earnestly that one of the most important novelists of the Victorian age was not Trollope himself but his mother, Fanny. This was because Mrs Trollope had “written about working-class people in an unsentimentalised sort of way”. I am afraid I have yet to verify that.
It was because of the academic disregard accorded to her son and his works that I felt, about 20 years ago, that I ought to read some of his works. Inevitably, I started with the first two Barchester novels, The Warden and Barchester Towers. I recall being struck by three things. First, the characterisation was amusing, and was rather what kept the reader’s interest. This was because, second, the plot was derivative, especially once one was on the second novel. One was seldom surprised by what happened, but one was amused by some turns of phrase of the characters as they coped with the predictable.
Third, the writing itself was not especially good.
Continued at The Telegraph | More Chronicle & Notices.
