Pope Hennessy 1971

Pope Hennessy, James. Anthony Trollope. London: Jonathan Cape, 1971.

15: Reading a novel aloud in the evening was by no means a habit confined to the Tilley and Trollope families [as they were the night AT had a stroke in Nov 1882]. It became popular in the 1840s when novels first began to be published in monthly parts [though that started late 1830s with Chapman & Hall, cf. Sutherland 1976], a method which kept the literate public on tenterhooks. Each successive instalment was 'anticipated with more anxiety than the Indian Mail, and...a great deal more talked about'. The excitement was, of course, higher pitched in isolated country houses and in trim vicarages than in the capital -- but in London, too, there were many long evenings to fill between the five or six o'clock dinner and bedtime. Prosperous [16] dwellers in the outskirts who did not frequent theatres and concert halls would while away the time with family readings. In the early 1860s these part-issues of novels were being superceded by serialization in such new magazines as Macmillan's and the Cornhill which sold for one shilling and ran serial novels as an attraction additional to informed topical articles and book reviews. Through the shilling magazine, works of fiction now reached a still wider public. Some novelists, notably Charles Dickens, would send one section of a book to press before they had embarked upon the next. This hand-to-mouth system did not appeal to Anthony Trollope. [..] When he first began to write, people of middle age could easily recall the days when novels were not considered suitable for reading aloud in the presence of younger members of the family. Queen Victoria, whose name has been so misleadingly allotted to a lengthy span of English literary history in reality containing at least three well-defined literary epochs, was allowed in her girlhood to read nothing more thrilling than the tales of Hannah More. The Bride of Lammermoor was her first true novel, for it was Walter Scott who initially had made the novel-form respectable -- and, in the words of a modern scholar, Kathleen Tillotson, 'through the breach he had made rushed Dickens'. After diceksn, whom he could never bring himself to admire, lumbered Anthony Trollope, 'seated', as Henry James once wrote, 'upon the back of heavy-footed prose.'

This new habit of young persons themselves reading works of fiction, or of hearing them read aloud, imposed upon the author that reticence in sexual matters which makes the English novel of the nineteenth century so astoundingly unlike the contemporary novel in France. For a variety of reasons the 1860s in England were marked by a form of humbug loosely referred to as 'Podsnappery' after the famous character in Our Mutual Friend. Anthony Trollope took pains to make his books conform to the new prudishness. The first novel he ever wrote, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, begun in 1843 and published four years later, had been enlivened by a seduction, a revenge murder, the still-birth of a bastard child, the mother's sudden death in the court-house and the public hanging of the murderer. By the next decade Trollope had moved on into the halcyon meadow-lands of Barsetshire where such happenings were unheard of and where the only hint of licentiousness lay in the mystery surrounding Mary Thorne's origins -- a rather special case whereby Miss Thorne suddenly inherits a fortune for the sole reason that she is illegitimate.

• what then of contemporary sensation fiction? Were reading practices different? Did people read The Moonstone aloud of an evening?