Name: Trollope: A Commentary
Author: Michael Sadleir

Limited first issue, 67 of 100, signed by the author. 

Writing in 2015, American essayist Adam Gopnik remarked that the ‘six Barsetshire novels […] are as much a triumph of the sympathetic imagination as Tolkien’s books: it is an entirely invented world’ (Gopnik, 2015). In his autobiography, Trollope remarks of his 1860–61 novel Framley Parsonage that, as he wrote it, he 'became more closely than ever acquainted with the new shire which I had added to the English counties’.  As one might expect from a postal surveyor, he conceived of Barsetshire with a top-down level of organisational detail: 

"I had it all in my mind, – its roads and railroads, its town and parishes, its members of Parliament, and the different hunts which rode over it. I knew all the great lords and their castles, the squires and their parks, the rectors and their churches."

Framley Parsonage was the fourth Barsetshire novel and the one during the writing of which Trollope drew an accompanying map, later remembering that by that point ‘there was no name given to a fictitious site which does not represent to me a spot of which I know all the accessories, as though I had lived and wandered there.’

The map Trollope claimed he had produced became something of a mystery for scholars and enthusiasts. In an early example of the sort of fan culture that thrives today, two ‘Trollopians’, Spencer van Bokkelen Nichols (1882–1946) and Ronald Knox (1888–1957) created their own maps of Barsetshire based on careful analysis of the texts. Nichols’ map appeared in his The Significance of Anthony Trollope (1925), which includes an atlas-index of Barsetshire detailing its constituent towns and villages. Knox’s map was published in The London Mercury in 1922, accompanying an article on Trollope’s ‘imaginary geography’, which included acknowledgment of its internal contradictions. These were republished in Trollope: A Commentary (1927) by Michael Sadleir (1888–1957). As well as the Nichols and Knox maps, Sadleir informs the reader that Trollope’s own map of Barsetshire was eventually discovered among some papers ‘three or four years ago’ (i.e. in the early 1920s).126 This is also reproduced in the book, as a larger fold-out map.

Barsetshire has since become a shared literary and imaginative space, with Barchester in particular serving as an archetypal west-country cathedral city, referenced in works as varied as M. R. James’s classic ghost story ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ (1910), the 1942 Ealing comedy film The Black Sheep of Whitehall, and Alan Moore’s (b. 1953) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999–). Trollope has long attracted a dedicated readership, some of whom ‘have tried to prove the Barsetshire map is internally consistent while others have created walks in London from Trollope’s novels’ (https://victorianweb.org/authors/trollope/moody3.html) .  Such attempts to map, reconcile, and physically explore an imagined world anticipate forms of participatory engagement now more commonly associated with fantasy fiction, video and role-playing games, and other popular media.

Ex Carta

 (1927) brings together three competing maps of Barsetshire: Trollope’s own long-lost sketch and later reconstructions by devoted readers Ronald Knox and Spencer van Bokkelen Nichols. Such attempts to map, reconcile, and physically explore an imagined world anticipate forms of participatory engagement now more commonly associated with fantasy fiction, video and role-playing games, and other popular media.

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) was born in London and had an unhappy childhood, marked by harsh schooling at a succession of institutions, where he was treated as a pariah partly because of his father’s worsening financial problems. After an unsatisfactory period as a clerk, including nearly seven years at the General Post Office in London, a move to Ireland in 1841 to work as a surveyor’s clerk marked the beginning of a happier and more successful stage of his life, which included his marriage to Rose Heseltine in 1844 (Hall, 2016).

Determined to become a writer, he published his first novel, 

, in 1847. Although it was a failure, his Post Office work entailed long journeys around Ireland, allowing him to continue writing around his professional duties and helping him develop the disciplined habits that remained with him for the rest of his life.

In 1851 he was sent back to England to reorganise postal services in the south-west of England and south Wales, work that involved months of travel, much of it on horseback. Although this interrupted his writing, it also brought him to the region that inspired the Barsetshire novels: according to Trollope’s own account, a visit to Salisbury Cathedral in 1852 suggested the plot of 

The Barsetshire novels chronicle the lives of the various clerics associated with the cathedral, as well as the wider society that surrounds it. Although sometimes judged uneven in their blend of comic social observation and serious moral inquiry into matters of the Church and its relationship with civic society, the novels established Trollope as a successful author and secured his reputation as one of the definitive Victorian novelists. He resigned from the Post Office in 1867, by which time his literary career was firmly established, and spent much of his later life travelling, including visits to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, while continuing to indulge his enthusiasm for hunting.

Writing in 2015, American essayist Adam Gopnik remarked that the ‘six Barsetshire novels […] are as much a triumph of the sympathetic imagination as Tolkien’s books: it is an entirely invented world’ (Gopnik, 2015). In his autobiography, Trollope remarks of his 1860–61 novel Framley Parsonage that, as he wrote it, he 'became more closely than ever acquainted with the new shire which I had added to the English counties’ (Trollope, 1922). As one might expect from a postal surveyor, he conceived of Barsetshire with a top-down level of organisational detail:

I had it all in my mind, – its roads and railroads, its town and parishes, its members of Parliament, and the different hunts which rode over it. I knew all the great lords and their castles, the squires and their parks, the rectors and their churches.

Framley Parsonage was the fourth Barsetshire novel and the one during the writing of which Trollope drew an accompanying map, later remembering that by that point ‘there was no name given to a fictitious site which does not represent to me a sport of which I know all the accessories, as though I had lived and wandered there.’

The map Trollope claimed he had produced became something of a mystery for scholars and enthusiasts. In an early example of the sort of fan culture that thrives today, two ‘Trollopians’, Spencer van Bokkelen Nichols (1882–1946) and Ronald Knox (1888–1957) created their own maps of Barsetshire based on careful analysis of the texts. Nichols’ map appeared in his The Significance of Anthony Trollope (1925), which includes an atlas-index of Barsetshire detailing its constituent towns and villages. Knox’s map was published in The London Mercury in 1922, accompanying an article on Trollope’s ‘imaginary geography’, which included acknowledgment of its internal contradictions. These were republished in Trollope: A Commentary (1927) by Michael Sadleir (1888–1957). As well as the Nichols and Knox maps, Sadleir informs the reader that Trollope’s own map of Barsetshire was eventually discovered among some papers ‘three of four years ago’ (i.e. in the early 1920s) (Sadleir, 1927). This is also reproduced in the book, as a larger fold-out map.

Barsetshire has since become a shared literary and imaginative space, with Barchester in particular serving as an archetypal west-country cathedral city, referenced in works as varied as M. R. James’s classic ghost story ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ (1910), the 1942 Ealing comedy film The Black Sheep of Whitehall, and Alan Moore’s (b. 1953) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999–).