Trollope in the Post Office

By: R. H. Super

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Synopsis: The works of Anthony Trollope are currently enjoying a popularity not seen since the success they met during his lifetime, a success that obscured until long after his death the true nature and extent of his literary merit. With this new found popularity has come a flurry of publishing about Trollope, primarily criticisms of the novels. Professor Super provides for the first time a scholarly examination of Trollope’s life — not his life as a writer who wrote 2,500 words every morning and published about four dozen novels — but his other life, his professional life with the British Post Office. Trollope was a civil servant before he was a novelist. For thirty-four years, from age nineteen to age fifty-two, he served the Post Office in assignments that gave him a detailed famillarity with Ireland, England, and Wales, and a personal acquaintance with the postal patrons. As a roving ambassador for the Post Office, he went to the West Indies, the Near East, and the United States. The book draws for the first time on the extensive records of Trollope’s career preserved in the Post Office archives in London. Interweaving these materials with other sources ofinformation, Professor Super presents, with meticulous scholarship and lucid style, the interrelation between Trollope’s Post Office work and his books.