A celebrated passage in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson describes a 1778 exchange between the Doctor and his famous friends as to whether e

The Way We Don’t Live Now

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2024-12-28 00:00:03

A celebrated passage in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson describes a 1778 exchange between the Doctor and his famous friends as to whether experience of the world reveals human beings to be better or worse than one might have assumed when young. Edward Gibbon, not known for sunny assessments of mankind, encapsulates the position of Edmund Burke and Johnson with the phrase, “Less just and more beneficent.” In other words, the man across from me might be slow to pay what he owes but will be quick enough to proffer aid or comfort to a person in distress. Johnson confirms the summary, saying, “And really it is wonderful, considering how much attention is necessary for men to take care of themselves, and ward off immediate evils which press upon them—it is wonderful how much they do for others.” Johnson’s appraisal of everyman, in which realism regarding baseness is set against a prevailing warmth toward the hard-won kindliness, comes near to distilling the animating ethos of nineteenth-century English novelist Anthony Trollope (1815–1882).

Trollope’s perch within the canon is assured, although it is not especially lofty. Much of his prodigious output—almost fifty novels, to say nothing of travel writing, short fiction, and articles—is still read today, but not as a matter of course, in the fashion of work by authors such as Charles Dickens or the Brontë sisters. He is not, like his friend George Eliot, regarded as a sage. And he has not accrued a tithe of the reverence the English-speaking world offers daily to Jane Austen, the major novelist whom he most closely resembles. He is the novelist as craftsman, not as artiste or guru. He takes his time, lingering over episodes that other writers would treat glancingly. And he is squarely, cheerfully Victorian . Canonical authors are often commended to us because they seem “relevant.” Their work, it is suggested, is in tune with our proclivities and mores; it anticipates our sense of what is right. This is not true of Trollope. The case for him begins by recognizing he should be read because he is not of our time.