fantastic-grotesque

Updated: May 21, 2025

In a certain sense, however, the last of the three, though he may give less impression of genius than the other two (or even the other four whom we have specially noticed), is the most interesting of all: and qualms may sometimes arise as to whether genius is justly denied to him. Anthony Trollope, after a youth, not exactly orageuse, but apparently characterised by the rather squalid yet mild dissipation which he has described in The Three Clerks and The Small House at Allington , attained a considerable position in the Post Office which he held during great part of his career as a novelist. For some time that career did not look as if it were going to be a successful one, though his early (chiefly Irish) efforts are better than is sometimes thought. But he made his mark first with The Warden , and then, much more directly and triumphantly, with its sequel Barchester Towers . When the first of these was published Dickens had been a successful novelist for nearly twenty years and Thackeray had "come to his own" for nearly ten. The Warden might have been described at the time (I do not know whether it was, but English reviewing was only beginning to be clever again) as a partial attempt at the matter of Dickens in a partial following of the manner of Thackeray. An "abuse" the distribution in supposed unjust proportion of the funds of an endowed hospital for aged men is its main avowed subject. But Trollope indulged in no tirades and no fantastic-grotesque caricature in fact he actually drew a humorous sketch of a novel

George Saintsbury - The English Novel