Snow on Trollope

Picked up a picture book about Trollope by Snow at the charity book stall attached to the Bourne Hall Museum the other day. I am usually a bit sniffy about books of this sort, but on this occasion I thought that Snow, as a writer of novels himself, might have had something interesting to say, and as it turned out, he did. £1.50 for a book in good if not new condition, which on first checking seemed an entirely reasonable price for something available from Amazon at around £15 plus postage and packing. But going further and checking with Abebooks, I find that they have quite a lot of copies, both the original hardback which I now have and paperback, at around £3 plus postage and packing. It appears to have been a successful book, which must reflect a continuing interest in Trollope. And in the television adaptations if not in the books. We do both.

Searching the other place (http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/) I find a steady trickle of references to Trollope, with the suggestion that I returned to him in 2007 after abstinence for around 35 years. Quite a lot of references to the 'Eustace Diamonds', an interest first triggered by this being BH's maiden name. The original Eustace is illustrated above, in his glory days, at the Battle of Hastings.

Snow clearly holds Trollope in high regard, a sort of semi-detached member of the Premier League. Part of this is, I think, his admiration for someone who could maintain a more or less decent and straightforward exterior, containing all the nastiness and complications without which a novelist could not function to the interior. He also believes that Tolstoy held him in high regard, a belief not shared by all the references that Professor Google turns up - but Tolstoy does appear to have been well read in the English novels of his time. I forget whether his English was good enough to read them in the original. Was there enough money in them for translation to be worthwhile?

I had not realised that Trollope came from a very respectable but rather odd family and had a rather unpleasant childhood. I had known that his mother and brother were both writers and I have the feeling that this is not the first book about Trollope that I have read, but I cannot, as yet, find any trace of another. Perhaps it was a biographical article in some magazine or other. Interesting to compare and contrast with Hardy, about whom I am presently reading in Tomalin (of which more in due course): like Hardy he was married for a long time and also like Hardy he liked to flirt with young women when he was famous but no longer young himself. Both wives had a lot of secretarial duties until displaced by younger models. I would think that they made about the same amount of money, enough to live in reasonable style but not enough to buy a place like Polesden Lacey; the real money being in brewing, not in writing. Despite their rather different backgrounds, Hardy respectable poor and Trollope poor posh, they both had to struggle a bit to get started as writers, not becoming well known until relatively late in life, say around 40. But unlike Hardy, Trollope did not live to old age - stroke brought on by high blood pressure - and predeceased his wife, with whom he remained on good terms for the whole of their long marriage.

Snow is interesting on what he regards as Trollope's special gifts of realism. Also on different ways of representing a person's interior in a novel - and he includes a short excursus on Joyce's rather different technique in Ulysses.

An easy and interesting read, not unlike that of the books of the man himself, nicely illustrated with pictures from places and times which he would have known, pictures of him and his contemporaries, pictures from his books and pictures which might have come from his books but didn't. I wonder how many of them served as Christmas gifts in the mid seventies when it was published and when picture books were more of a luxury than they are now?

PS: also interesting how I am starting to take more interest in the lives of the authors of books which I read. When younger I was a firm believer in the line that the book was the thing, which should stand or fall on its own, without regard to the circumstances of its author or production. Whereas in recent weeks I have spent a lot more time reading about Hardy than reading (or indeed, watching) Hardy. And a visit to his house, now more or less on top of the ring road, rather than out in the country, in Dorchester, may be imminent.