Anthony Trollope

THE Norman Tallyhosier, who accompanied William the Conqueror to England, when hunting with his royal master in the New Forest, happened to kill three wolves; the King at once dubbed him “Troisloup.” The changes and corruptions of successive centuries left the word Trollope. Such at least was the traditional account of the patronymic volunteered by Anthony Trollope, when at Harrow, to his school-fellow, Sidney Herbert, and afterwards forcibly extracted from him upon many different occasions by the boys, whose fancy it tickled or whose incredulity it provoked. Such scepticism was the more pardonable, because the earliest Trollope of any distinction, Sir Andrew, in the fifteenth century, rose to knighthood during the Wars of the Roses from beginnings more humble than would be expected in the case of one whose forefathers were personages at the Norman Court. However that may be, the Trollope stock can claim description as ancient, honourable, and of high degree. Amid many changes of employment and fortune, Anthony Trollope’s bearing and conduct were those of one who, while modestly proud of his ancestral honours, yet always saw in them a Sparta given him by birth to adorn a social capital entrusted to him by nature for laying out at intellectual interest. Throughout all his trials and vicissitudes he lived with men distinguished by their position or achievements. Comparing himself with these, he might well be satisfied, not only with his power of transmuting manuscript into money, but with having done as little as any, and less than some, to bring discredit upon family antecedents and an historic name.

When Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography appeared in 1883, much of its contents was already familiar outside the limit of his personal intimates. No man so largely preoccupied, as his temperament and pursuits made him, with himself, ever talked less about his interests and affairs except with a few particular friends in the privacy of home life. In the year of his death, 1882, mentioning to the present writer the sheets of self-record whose preparation he had several years before finished, he described them as a series of pegs. “On them,” he added, “may be hung those materials about my life and work which may be gathered by those who, like yourself, may be disposed to say something about me.”

For several reasons presently to appear, nothing could better match later associations of the Trollope family than for its mythical founder first to have been heard of in the county where much of his mother’s girlhood was passed, and where Anthony sometimes found a retreat for his declining years. Troisloup’s descendants—to assume that there existed some foundation in fact for the story which, without having thought much about it, young Anthony presaged the novelist’s inventiveness by telling his Harrow schoolmates—made no further contributions to Hampshire history, but gradually identified themselves with the north-midland or the northern counties. When the family baronetcy was created in 1641 the Trollopes had settled near Stamford, and soon supplied Lincolnshire with one of its great territorial magnates in Sir John Trollope, who for more than a quarter of a century represented the southern division of the county. He belonged to those “men of metal and large-acred squires” mentioned by Disraeli as forming Lord George Bentinck’s chief bodyguard of the Tory revolt against Sir Robert Peel in 1846. This was that typical county member who, during the full-dress debates on the Bill for opening the ports, agreed with Sir Charles Burrell, Sir William Jolliffe, and Sir Charles Knightley not to follow their leader. Under protection, it had been repeatedly said during the debate and on other occasions, the land failed to provide food for the people; Sir John Trollope declared there was not in his own neighbourhood a single acre lying waste, that from 1828 to 1841 Lincoln county had enlarged its wheat produce by 70 per cent., while the population had only increased 20 per cent. Thus, argued Sir John, there was a large surplus available to feed the manufacturing districts.