The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope ed. by Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles (review)

Reading through the essays collected in The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope, I am struck by the frequency with which Anthony Trollope himself and Henry James are called upon to explain Trollope’s ambivalent position as an author and artist. The compulsion to recur to those famous passages in An Autobiography (1883) where Trollope proclaims the virtues of his workaday writing method and to put against them James’s criticism of such industrious modes of literary production signals the persistence of a divide between artistry and professionalism that is rarely absent from Trollope studies. The comparison provides evidence of Victorian sensibilities, to be sure, but it also functions as a kind of scholarly tic that reveals what Trollope’s authorship has come to mean for present-day Victorianists. In the present volume, the distinction becomes a paradox that extends into all aspects of Trollope’s oeuvre and reception and earns him what editors Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles describe as his “bimodality”: Trollope, they say, is “an artist of the dialectic” whose work “stages encounters between the polarities of the [Victorian] day” that also serve today’s readers as a mirror in which to contemplate and understand themselves (2). Although such adaptability makes Trollope seem a particularly modern Victorian, this familiar gesture toward relevance for the undergraduate curriculum works in reverse too and implies that we remain more Victorian than we, or our students at any rate, think.

In their brief introduction, Dever and Niles map the collection’s contours in a way that, more implicitly than not, speaks to the contradictions in Trollope’s reception. The volume begins with the familiar Trollope: Mark W. Turner and Victoria Glendinning show readers the Trollope of the literary marketplace and the Autobiography; Mary Poovey and William A. Cohen then present the author of the Barsetshire and Palliser series. In this way, the volume itself restages or reconstructs the dichotomous character that emerges in so many of the chapters’ references to James and Trollope. That is, the collection asks readers to see Trollope first and foremost as a successful, prolific, and professional literary man, if not exactly a man of letters, and gives evidence of his popularity with the works for which he is best known. The collection then moves to the less well-known Trollope of the later novels, short fiction, and sensation novels. These forays into genre are followed by essays as various as Kate Flint’s on “Queer Trollope,” Elsie B. Michie’s on “Vulgarity,” and Ayelet Ben-Yishai’s on legal culture. The volume is anchored by a nicely grouped set of essays written by James Buzard, Nicholas Birns, Gordon Bigelow, and Amanda Claybaugh on what Turner, in his contribution, refers to as “global Trollope” (12).

On the whole, the volume is a welcome introduction to Trollope and to some of the most prominent scholars of his writing. Students will be impressed by both the quantity and range of his work. If some of the novels come in for more discussion than others and in that sense are a bit overexposed, the essays about them nevertheless model for students the way that single texts allow for multiple analyses of race, gender, sexuality, and other topical issues. The editors were also fortunate in their contributors and have brought together major scholars who perform the work of a critical survey, although an additional chapter to assess the critical heritage itself might have consolidated many of the chapters’ common references.

My sole reservation about the collection lies in the pattern of many of the essays: a theme or issue is introduced, followed by brief, illustrative readings of two to three novels; this pattern makes the readings seem perfunctory, a sacrifice of the intimacy implied by the series’s moniker “Companion” for the more utilitarian goals of the survey. True, the pattern is most visible only when...