Tales of the Trollope trail
Published
in the Daily Telegraph, 29Jul2004
Anthony Trollope, the indefatigable author of 47 novels, was a discerning
house-buyer who refused to be parted from his 5,000 books, horses and wine,
says his descendant, James Trollope.
As a man who asked so much of himself, it's not surprising that when
it came to house-hunting, the novelist Anthony Trollope was equally demanding.
The
old boy usually managed to bang out 10 pages before breakfast and it says
a lot for his staying power that, although he died more than 120 years
ago, he still seems to be supplying television with much of its costume
drama.
So what did my prolific ancestor look for in a house and how did his
choice of property influence his work?
As well as producing 47 novels, Trollope held down a top job at the
Post Office, rode to hounds like a fiend and buzzed around the world when
it was by no means easy to do so. Up until the age of 40, his choice of
home was, more or less, decided for him; first by his parents, and then
by his employers, who sent him to help sort out the postal service in Ireland.
But, in 1859, at the age of 44, having launched the Barchester novels
and given British letter writers the pillar box, he and his wife, Rose,
with their two sons and five servants, settled into their first English
family home.
Trollope demanded a library, a wine cellar, stables for his horses and
a garden. He found them all at Waltham House in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire.
The large, red-brick residence had the added advantage of being only a
short train ride from London and his beloved Garrick Club.
Trollope blazed a trail for home workers. Not only did he turn his library
into a fiction factory, he moved some of his post office staff into the
house, thus combining his two sources of income under one roof.
In the 12 years he spent at Waltham, Trollope published some 30 books,
including The Last Chronicle of Barset and He Knew He Was Right, the most
recent to be televised.
His Irish groom, Barney, had the task of waking him at five every morning
with a cup of coffee, and Trollope would be at his desk half an hour later.
Barney was paid an extra fiver a year for his trouble. Trollope, in his
autobiography, was fully appreciative. "I do not know that I ought not
to feel that I owe more to him than to anyone else for the success that
I have had. By beginning at that hour I could complete my literary work
before I dressed for breakfast."
Although Trollope did make time for play, much of it sounds suspiciously
like hard work. When not hunting furiously with the Essex Foxhounds, he
was often seen charging around his garden with a heavy roller. "We grew
our own cabbages and strawberries, made our own butter and killed our own
pigs," he recalled. He also had cows, dogs and chickens as well as four
hunters and several acres of grounds, including an asparagus bed of which
he was especially proud.
The artist Sir John Millais, who illustrated some of his books, was
a regular visitor. Another guest remembers how, in summer after dinner,
they would adjourn to the lawn, where "wines and fruits were laid out under
the fine, old cedar tree and many a good story was told as cigar smoke
went curling up into the soft twilight".
It's a mystery why Trollope decided to leave Waltham House and move
to London. Perhaps it was because, at the age of 56, his Post Office career
was over and his hunting days were numbered. At any rate, he chose a house
in Montagu Square, Marylebone, where the priority was to arrange his library.
In his autobiography, he claimed that his 5,000 books were dearer to him
than his horses or his wine.
During the seven years he was in the house, he added another 16 books
of his own and it's no coincidence that in London his writing took on a
more metropolitan tone. It was in Montagu Square that he completed The
Way We Live Now, a tale of financial skulduggery reminiscent of recent
city scandals.
There were irritations to city life, however, not least the noise. Although
Montagu Square was relatively quiet, Trollope had a run-in with the conductor
of some German street musicians. "No sooner does the first note of the
opening burst reach my ear than I start up, fling down my pen and cast
my thoughts disregarded into the abyss of some chaos which is always there
to receive them," he writes melodramatically.
It appears Trollope eventually succeeded in getting the police to silence
the brass band which, needless to say, upset the leader with whom he had
a few awkward encounters.
In
1880, at the age of 65, Trollope returned to the country and moved into
what was to be his final house, at South Harting in West Sussex. He described
it as "a little cottage just big enough to hold my books with five acres,
a cow and a dog and a cock and a hen." In fact, it has nine bedrooms and
sold earlier this year for about £1.5 million.
While Trollope busied himself with his wine cellar, produced nine books,
sat on the management committee of the local school and was a regular churchgoer,
there was no disguising his physical decline. He was increasingly deaf,
suffered from asthma and, not surprisingly, writer's cramp. He died in
London after a stroke at the age of 67.
Sharing the old boy's surname is a source of pride and occasional embarrassment.
When bidding at auction or ordering a meal at a pub, I have often wished
I was a Smith or a Brown. Shout "Trollope" in a crowded room and you're
almost guaranteed a laugh. "Poor girl," they all said when my two-year-old
daughter proudly introduced herself at her first music class.
The Trollope women have the worst of it. Just as well my cousin, Joanna,
is bolstering the literary rather than the literal side of the name. Trollope
himself was teased and worse at school but, after a miserable childhood,
he had a hugely satisfying middle age.
He was perhaps at his happiest at Waltham Cross, then a rural idyll,
now an urban sprawl. The multi-purpose house became a convent before being
knocked down in 1936. A bingo hall marks the spot. His home in Montagu
Square has since been converted into flats. Only the lovely "little cottage"
at South Harting remains more or less unchanged.
Stockbroker Tim Wise, his wife Judith, a landscape designer, and their
three young children are in the process of moving in. They tell me they
enjoyed the recent Trollope TV drama and are now looking forward to reading
some of his books. |