Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/607

Rh north-east of Orenburg, on the Siberian highway, is one of those towns which have grown rapidly of late in the south-east of Russia. The Troitskiy fort, erected in 1743, became a centre for the exchange trade with the Kirghiz steppe and Turkestan, and in that trade Troitsk is now second only to Orenburg. Cotton, silk, and especially horses and cattle are imported, while leather, cotton, and woollen and metal wares are exported. An active trade in corn for the Ural gold-mines is carried on. The population in 1884 was 13,000.

 TROLLOPE, (1815-1882), English novelist, was born in Keppel Street, Russell Square, London, according to most authorities, on 24th April 1815; in his own Autobiography he merely gives the year. His father, a barrister, who had been fellow of New College, Oxford, brought himself and his family into the sorest straits by unbusiness-like habits, by quarrelling with his profession, or at least with the attorneys, and by injudicious speculations, especially in farming. Trollope's mother, Frances Milton, according to her son, was nearly thirty when she married in 1809. By her husband's wish she made a strange journey to America in 1827, for the purpose of setting up a kind of fancy shop in Cincinnati, which failed utterly. Her visit, however, furnished her with the means of writing The Domestic Manners of the Americans. This at once brought her in a considerable sum, and thence forward she continued to be the mainstay of her family. Her husband being obliged at last actually to fly the country from his creditors, his wife maintained him by her pen, at Bruges, till his death there in 1835. For some time Mrs Trollope wrote chiefly travels; but she soon became known as a novelist, and was very industrious. Her novels, the best of which are probably The Vicar of Wrexhill and The Widow Barnaby, are now rarely read, and indeed were never at their best above good circulating library level: they are written with cleverness indeed, and a certain amount of observation, but with many faults of taste, and with an almost total want of artistic complete ness and form. Her late beginning, her industrious career (for she wrote steadily for more than thirty years, till her death in October 1863, at Florence), and the entire absence in her of any blue-stocking or femme-savante weakness would have made her remarkable, even if she had not transmitted, as she undoubtedly did transmit, her talent, much increased, to her children.

Anthony Trollope was the third son. By his own account few English men of letters have had an unhappier childhood and youth. He puts down his own misfortunes, at Harrow, at Winchester, at Harrow again, and elsewhere, to his father's pecuniary circumstances, which made his own appearance dirty and shabby, and subjected him to various humiliations. But it is permissible to suspect that this was not quite the truth, and that some peculiarities of temper, of which in after life he had many, contributed to his unpopularity. At any rate he seems to have reached the verge of manhood as ignorant as if he had had no education at all. While living abroad he tried ushership; but at the age of nineteen he was pitchforked by favour (for he could not pass even the ridiculous examination then usual) into the post-office. Even then his troubles were not over. He got into debt; he got into ridiculous entanglements of love affairs, which he has very candidly avowed; he was in constant hot water with the authorities; and he seems to have kept some very queer company, which long afterwards stood him instead as models for some of his novel pictures. At last in August 1841 he obtained the appointment of clerk to one of the post-office surveyors in a remote part of Ireland, with a very small nominal salary. This salary, however, was practically quadrupled by allowances; living was cheap; and the life suited Trollope exactly, being not office work, which he always hated, but a kind of travelling inspectorship. And here he not only began that habit of hunting which (after a manner hardly possible in the stricter conditions of official work nowadays) he kept up for many years even in England, but within three years of his appointment engaged himself to Miss Rose Heseltine, whom he had met in Ireland but who was of English birth. They were married in June 1844. His headquarters had previously been at Banagher; he was now transferred to Clonmel.

Trollope had always dreamt of novel-writing, and his Irish experiences seemed to supply him with promising subjects. With some assistance from his mother he got his first two books, The Macdermots of Ballycloran and The Kellys and the O'Kellys, published, the one in 1847, the other the next year. But neither was in the least a success, though the second perhaps deserved to be; and a third, La Vendée, which followed in 1850, besides being a much worse book than either, was an equal failure. Trollope made various other literary attempts, but for a time ill fortune attended all of them. Meanwhile he was set on a new kind of post-office work, which suited him even better than his former employment—a sort of roving commission to inspect rural post deliveries and devise their extension, first in Ireland, then throughout the west of England and South Wales. That he did good work is undeniable; but his curious conception of official duty (on his discharge of which he prided himself immensely) is exhibited by his confessions that he "got his hunting out of it," and that he felt "the necessity of travelling miles enough [he was paid by mileage] to keep his horses." It was during this work that he struck the vein which gave him fortune and fame—which might perhaps have given him more fame and not much less fortune if he had not worked it so hard—by conceiving The Warden. This was published in 1855. It brought him little immediate profit, nor was even Barchester Towers, which followed, very profitable, though it contains his freshest, his most original, and, with the exception of The Last Chronicle of Barset, his best work. The two made him a reputation, however, and in 1858 he was able for the first time to sell a novel, The Three Clerks, for a substantial sum, £250. A journey on post-office business to the West Indies gave him material for a book of travel, The West Indies and the Spanish Main, which he frankly and quite truly acknowledges to be much better than some subsequent work of his in the same kind. From this time his production (mainly of novels) was incessant, and the sums which he received were very large, amounting in one case to as much as £3525 for a single book, and to nearly £70,000 in the twenty years between 1859 and 1879. All these particulars are given with great minuteness by himself, and are characteristic. The full high tide of his fortunes began when the Cornhill Magazine was established in the autumn of 1859. He was asked at short notice to write a novel, and wrote Framley Parsonage, which was extremely popular; two novels immediately preceding it, The Bertrams and Castle Richmond, had been much less successful.

As it will be possible to notice few of his subsequent works in detail, the list of them, a sufficiently astonishing one, may be given here:—Tales of All Countries (3 series, 1861-1870); Orley Farm, North America (1862); Rachael Bay (1863); The Small House at Allington, Can You Forgive Her? (1864); Miss Mackenzie (1865); The Claverings, Nina Balatka, The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867); Linda Tressel (1868); Phineas Finn, He Knew He Was Right (1869); Brown, Jones, and Robinson, The Vicar of Bullhampton, An Editors Tales, Cæsar (1870); Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, Ralph the Heir (1871); The Golden Lion of Granpere (1872); The Eustace Diamonds, Australia and New Zealand (1873); Phineas Redux, Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, Lady Anna (1874); The Way We Live Now (1875); The Prime Minister (1876); The American Senator (1877); ''Is He Popenjoy? South Africa (1878); John Caldigate, An Eye for''

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