Anthony Trollope wrote 47 novels while holding down a full-time Post Office job
A bullied schoolboy and hopeless junior clerk, Anthony Trollope was rescued by a posting nobody wanted: postal surveyor in rural Ireland. There he found prosperity, fox hunting, a wife and a habit of writing on long train journeys to fixed daily targets. It made him one of the most prolific novelists who ever lived.
Trollope grew up in genteel poverty. His father, a clever barrister and Oxford fellow, failed at law through bad temper, lost money farming and saw an expected inheritance vanish. Anthony attended Harrow and Winchester without money or friends, was bullied relentlessly and at 12 imagined killing himself, escaping instead into elaborate daydream worlds. His mother, Frances, rescued the family finances by becoming a successful writer after failed ventures in America. In 1834 his father fled to Belgium to escape arrest for debt, and the family lived on her earnings near Bruges.
A family friend found Anthony a clerkship at the General Post Office that autumn. By his own account his first seven years there helped neither himself nor the public: he was late, insubordinate and hounded at his desk by a moneylender after a £12 tailor's bill ballooned past £200. In 1841 he volunteered for a surveyor's job in central Ireland, and his relieved boss sent him. Judged on merit, he flourished within a year, found his pay went further, took up hunting and warmed to the Irish, whom he found clever and hospitable.
He married Rose Heseltine in 1844 and began writing in earnest in railway carriages, occasionally mining the lost-letter box for ideas. His first novels were set in Ireland, and English readers ignored them; one publisher told him plainly that Irish subjects did not sell. The turn came in 1851, when he spent two happy years reorganising rural mail across southwest England and south Wales. A visit to Salisbury Cathedral gave him the idea for The Warden, published in 1855, the first of six Barsetshire novels.
The early profits were tiny, but Barchester Towers in 1857 cemented his reputation, and by 1859, now working near London, he was offered £1,000 for a novel by the new Cornhill Magazine. Alongside the Barsetshire books, the Palliser series and The Way We Live Now tackled politics, society and gender. His standing slipped late in life but recovered by the mid-twentieth century.
Source: Anthony Trollope
