Anthony Trollope – Interesting Literature

Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period: Victorian Dystopia

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle examines a most unTrollopian Trollope novel

Anthony Trollope was a prolific writer. He wrote 47 novels, as well as numerous works of non-fiction including autobiography and travel writing. And he did much of this while holding down a job at the Post Office, by getting up at 5.30 every morning and writing 250 words every 15 minutes, pacing himself with a watch. (Clearly such industriousness ran in the family: Trollope’s mother, Frances Trollope, woke at 4 o’clock every morning and got her day’s writing finished in time to serve breakfast.)

Five Fascinating Facts about Anthony Trollope

A short biography of Anthony Trollope, told in five interesting pieces of trivia

1. Trollope invented the postbox. Well, sort of. Born in 1815, Trollope worked for the Post Office for 33 years until his retirement in 1867 – by which time he was making so much money from his writing that he could afford to live by his pen full-time. During his time as surveyor general of the Post Office, he introduced the pillar box to Britain when they were trialled on the island of Jersey in 1854 (they were introduced to mainland Britain a year later). The pillar boxes were originally painted green, but in 1874 they were changed to red – supposedly because people kept bumping into them.

The Advent Calendar of Literature: Day 11

Yesterday we considered that gastronomic phenomenon that is the Christmas dinner, and revealed Dickens’s early piece of journalism about Christmas time, written some eight years before A Christmas Carol. Today, on to pudding – yes, today’s literature fact might be considered the dessert course in our feast of festive literary morsels. According to the Oxford English … Read more