Sound the trumpets! I finished Our Mutual Friend this morning! As predicted, the bad people die (or are exiled from England in shame, perhaps a fate worse than death!), the good people marry, and the best people end up happy and with lots of money. Hope that didn't spoil the ending for anyone out there reading along!

Next up, Trollope, and just in time, for he celebrated a birthday this week. So, those of you that were not thrilled with Dickens, how about The Prime Minister, by Trollope? Hopefully he will be true to his word and it will be READABLE. Here's another amusing biography care of The Writer's Almanac.

It's the birthday of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, (books by this author) born in London, England (1815). His father was a British gentleman who had failed at being a lawyer, a scholar, and a farmer, and the family sank deeper and deeper into debt. The children at school made fun of his worn, muddy clothes and his teachers were exceptionally cruel. He later said, "[I may have] been flogged oftener than any human being alive." The only reason his family didn't fall into complete poverty was that his mother started writing books for a living, and he looked up to her so much that he decided to become a writer himself.

He got a job in London as a postal clerk. He struggled to pay his bills, he had a series of unhappy love affairs, and nothing came of his writing. Then, in 1841, he was offered a transfer to Ireland, and he saw it as a chance to make a clean start.

In Ireland, Trollope developed a social life for the first time. He went hunting, and he went to pubs and he fell in love and got married, all within a few years. Once he had settled down to his new life, he began to write fiction. In his job for the postal service, he rode a horse over all the rural routes himself, to ensure that a letter could be delivered to the remotest possible areas. It was while he was riding across the countryside that a fictional English county called Barsetshire sprang up in his mind.

In just eleven years, between 1855 and 1866, Trollope published six novels about the extended families and parishioners and civil service workers living in that imaginary county of Barsetshire, novels such as The Warden (1955), Barchester Towers (1857), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866), all of which were best-sellers.


The novelist Henry James said, "Trollope did not write for posterity. He wrote for the day, the moment; but these are just the writers whom posterity is apt to put into its pocket."

Anthony Trollope said, "Of the needs a book has, the chief need is that it be readable."

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2006/04/24/index.html

Still chugging through Dickens. I'm over half way now, and there are numerous characters that I truly don't care about one bit and am getting pretty annoyed by. Luckily, people are starting to die, rather than new folks getting introduced - hopefully this trend will continue and I'll have fewer characters to keep track of in the second half of the book!

In the meantime, I heard this on The Writer's Almanac this morning: the 2 tidbits in red were choice, I thought, and shed some light on James.

It's the birthday of the novelist Henry James, born in New York City (1843). His first memory was an image of a monument to Napoleon as his family traveled by carriage through Paris, and though he was an American, he always loved Europe and spent most of his life living there.

At some point in his childhood, he was injured, possibly in a fire. He never said much about it to his friends, except that the injury was "horrid," but some scholars have suggested that perhaps he was scarred in some way that would explain why he never had a single love affair with anyone. As far as we know, he died without ever having even received a romantic kiss.

But he wrote almost 10 million words of fiction and nonfiction, including Daisy Miller (1878), Washington Square (1880), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

He became a British citizen near the end of his life as a show of support for Great Britain in World War I. One time, he said to a group of his English friends, "However British you may be, I am more British still."

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/ April 15, 2008

1/4 of the way through!

200 pages into Our Mutual Friend, only 600 to go! It took about 80 pages, which felt like an eternity, to get all of the characters introduced and connected to one another in one way or another, and now that I've slogged through, I can really enjoy the story.

Having not read Dickens since Great Expectations in high school, I had forgotten what a wonderful observer of character he is - I care about the good Mr. and Mrs. Boffin and I laugh (sometimes to keep from crying) at the ridiculous Veneerings. I can't help but sympathize with Dickens' strong distaste for the nouveau riche, and wonder what he would have to say about modern America and our often obscene obsession with material possessions and status. It's as if the Veneerings have only multiplied.

On a very practical note, I sincerely have no idea how one is expected to be a working professional and also get all of this reading done before the summer session. I think next summer I will be sure to avoid choosing 2 courses from the very wordy 1800s!