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FRAMLEY PARSONAGE

ANTHONY TROLLOPE was born in London in 1815 and died in 1882. His father was a barrister who went bankrupt and the family was maintained by his mother, Frances, who resourcefully in later life became a bestselling writer. He received little education and his childhood generally seems to have been an unhappy one.

Happily established in a successful career in the Post Office (from which he retired in 1867), Trollope’s first novel was published in 1847. He went on to write over forty novels as well as short stories, and enjoyed considerable acclaim as a novelist during his lifetime. The idea for The Warden (1855), the first of his novels to achieve success, was conceived while he wandered around Salisbury Cathedral one mid-summer evening. It was succeeded by other ‘Barsetshire’ novels employing the same characters including Archdeacon Grantly, the worldly cleric, the immortal Mrs Proudie and the saintly warden, Septimus Harding. These novels are Barchester Towers (1857), Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), The Small House at Allington (1864) and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). This series is regarded by many as Trollope’s masterpiece, in which he demonstrates his imaginative grasp of the great preoccupation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novels – property. Almost equally popular were the six brilliant Palliser novels comprising Can You Forgive Her? (1864), Phineas Finn (1869), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Phineas Redux (1874), The Prime Minister (1876) and The Duke’s Children (1880). The notable titles among his many other novels and books include He Knew He Was Right (1868–9), The Way We Live Now (1874–5), An Autobiography (1875–6) and Dr Wortle’s School (1881).

DAVID SKILTON was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and Copenhagen University, and is Research Professor in English at Cardiff University, where until 2002 he was Head of the School of English, Communication and Philosophy. He is Literary Adviser to the Trollope Society and General Editor of the Trollope Society/Folio Society edition of Trollope’s novels. His books include Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries (1972 and 1996), Defoe to the Victorians (1985). The Early and Mid-Victorian Novel (1993), and numerous editions of Victorian works, including Trollope’s Prime Minister (1994) and An Autobiography (1996) in Penguin Classics.

PETER MILES lectures at the University of Wales, Lampeter. He is author of “Wuthering Heights”: The Critics Debate (1999) and co-author of Cinema, Literature and Society: Elite and Mass Culture in Interwar Britain (1987). He has edited Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago and Wilkie Collins’s The Dream Woman and Other Stories. With David Skilton he has also edited Collins’s The Woman in White. He has contributed to such journals as The Book Collector, The Library and Studies in Bibliography.