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Anthony
Trollope's Secret Scottish Life 'Anthony
Trollope's Secret Scottish Life' (Adobe Acrobat .pdf format) Antonia Swinson is planning an illustrated lecture on her findings. For further information about Anthony Trollope, please follow the links listed in the right hand collums. Read "Brought to book by cash secrets" on line (Article in the Times ... 20 March, 2000) Read "The Dark Secret that Mr Trollope hid from his Victorian Admirers" by Sue Tranter (Daily Mail, Saturday, July 29, 2000) The Sunday Times • March 26, 2000 Antonia Swinson LAST Wednesday 200 guests assembled in Lincoln's Inn, London, at the annual dinner of the Trollope Society. Margaret Drabble, the novelist, proposed the society's health; Lord Alexander of Weedon, the former Chairman of NatWest, responded; Lord Hurd, the former foreign secretary, applauded. Would their evening have been such a success if they had known that their hero, Anthony Trollope may have practised sleaze at first hand and not merely in fiction? Papers at Glasgow's Mitchell Library suggest Trollope, a civil servant, accepted hospitality from government contractors before doing them a favour that saved their business. The papers reveal a dubious side to Trollope's 30-year friendships with the Scottish shipping magnate George Burns and his son John, who became the first Lord Inverclyde. The Burnses ran a near-monopoly of mail boats for Britain's postal service to Ireland, and relied on this to finance the purchase of the Cunard Line, which ran mail to America. In October 1854, Trollope, then 39, had finished his first novel, The Warden, when he took up the postal service position of surveyor for the Northern Ireland district – and a mysterious gap appeared in his meticulously documented life. A newspaper interview with John Burns among the papers in the Mitchell Library reveals that the civil servant was enjoying the Burnses' hospitality at Castle Wemyss, their palatial home on the Clyde near Largs. The Burnses had no interest in literature, but they had every reason to see Trollope in his post office role. Their postal service cash-cow was being threatened by a rival company bidding for the Irish mail run. The interview with
John Burns – found in Burns family scrapbooks known as the Inverclyde
Collection – suggests Trollope's stay at Castle Wemyss was a long
one, as he "thought out and wrote a great portion of Barchester
Towers", his second novel, while there. A few months later,
when a parliamentary committee investigated the rival bid for the Irish
mail run, Trollope gave evidence on behalf of the Bumses. Speaking for four
days, using his authority as the recognised expert on the Irish postal
service, he demonstrated that the rival proposal would be neither cheaper
nor more efficient. "I do not think any other officer has local
knowledge of the whole district except myself," he said. The
committee decided in favour of the Burnses. Trollope's stay at
Castle Wemyss may explain the snatches of Scottish poetry throughout Barchester
Towers. The Bums connection
is also a clue to the plot – the arrival of an evangelical bishop
in Barchester. This had been regarded as prescient, as it was written
immediately before the promotion of the evangelicals in the Church of
England by Lord Palmerston. Trollope appears to have heard of it from
Palmerston's adviser, the Earl of Shaftesbury, a fellow guest. In his autobiography,
Trollope inveighed against corruption. "A man who takes public
money is so odious I can find no pardon in him. Nothing would annoy me
more than to think I should ever be supposed to have been among their
number." NB Sub's error on the Sunday Times. Barchester Towers was the second Barchester novel and not Trollope's second novel. Responses to Antonia Swinson please ...
TROLLOPE CELEBRATIONS UPSET BY THREAT OF NEW YEAR REVELATIONS There is both good news and bad news for admirers of Anthony Trollope, arguably the best loved and most widely read today of the great Victorian novelists, as the anniversary of his death on December 6th, 1882 approaches. Early next year a new book from acclaimed novelist and author of The Cousins’ Tale Antonia Swinson will be published in London by Hodder and Stoughton which for the first time will:
Trollope’s hidden life is inextricably bound up with the great commercial and maritime events of the mid Victorian era. It is a world of epoch making business exuberance, staggering luxury and questionable friendships lasting thirty years, the true nature of which has never been publicly revealed. Until now. Antonia Swinson’s new novel The Love Child, which is set in London and Scotland in 1995, utilises Trollope’s secret life and his attempts at cover up, as a stunning backdrop for a plot which follows in the finest tradition of Possession. However unlike Antonia Byatt’s Booker prize winning novel, Swinson’s work does actually solve a real long standing literary mystery which has taxed the intellects of the world’s leading Trollope scholars for decades, including the authors of four recent major biographies. It is inevitable that the publication of Antonia Swinson’s The Love Child will lead to a major re-evaluation of the character of Anthony Trollope.  End of Document • return to top
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Links For further information about Anthony Trollope we recommend the following Websites: The
Victorian Web
www.trollope.org Japanese
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