Let's Talk About Anthony Trollope

right so hello and welcome back to books and things and today let's talk about Anthony Trollope Anthony Trollope was a Victorian novelist who was born in 1815 and died in 1882 and here's one of my absolute favorite Victorian novelists basically goes Dickens Gaskell trollop pretty close to Gaskell he is absolutely wonderful and there are so many things I love by him so I thought I would make a video on him I've read 10 books by him one of which is a short story collection nine of which were novels that's nine novels after the forty-seven novels which he wrote he was very prolific and I would like to read everything by him but it's gonna take a while I am hoping that later on in the year probably in April around the time of his birthday I will be doing a but just a week but I will talk about his bat-restorer Chronicles one book a day for six days and a week because I love that series a lot and I want to talk about them in a bit more depth but I thought because I've also read some other books by him which I adore and because there are so many things I adore about him as an author in general I don't make a let's talk about auntie trollop video first so first they want to go through seven reasons why I love Antony trot and why you should read him and then I will talk quickly about the ten books by him that I have read so number one reason why I love unsweet Rowlett why you might like him too is that I find his writing very easy and accessible for Victorian literature and I find his books fairly quick to read some of them are quite long but I never find them heavy he's one of those Victorian writers that I think is in general not that difficult to read or to understand quite a lot of people start with his first artist the novel which is the warden which I think it's not always the right place to start I love it but I think it is one of the driest of his novels though really really interesting but in general his writing is really smooth it's really easy to follow he has a lot of dialogue and his dialogue is often really enjoyable quite like short sentences and really funny his writing is elegant and beautiful but also kind of precise and simple and great another reason why I love him is that he's very very witty and he has quite like a wry wit it's less slaps they could laugh out loud funny than Dickens but it's a bit more subtle and he often pokes fun at things in a really really enjoyable way let me read you a little short bit from the way we dove now that really made me giggle mr. Longstaff was intensely proud of his position in life thinking himself to be a measure leaf superior to all those who earned their bread there were no doubt gentlemen of different degrees with the English gentleman of gentlemen's he who had land and family title deeds and an old family place and family portrait and family embarrassments and a family absence of any useful employment actually trollop takes great pleasure in poking fun at the absurdities in society and he also takes pleasure sometimes in disliking his dislikeable characters and telling you that he dislikes his dislikeable characters he also slides off various Victorian figures he was a staunch liberal and really disliked Disraeli so they require loss snide remarks that Disraeli in the way we live now and he also had a little kind of ongoing jokey battle with Dickens because ants Patrol is much more of a realist than Dickens and there's a bit in the warden where Anthony Trollope makes a big joke about a particular situation and what Dickens would do if Dickens was writing about this situation and what Anthony Trollope is gonna do instead and it really makes me giggle he has really really fun enjoyable funny writing the third thing I love about Anthony Trollope is his unconventional plots as someone who reads quite a lot of Victorian literature I sometimes go into a Victorian novel read the first half and kind of know roughly what's gonna go down in the second half and one of the things I loved that auntie trollop is that his books are not like that and many of them keep you on your seat really really guessing with endings that break Victorian conventions and beginnings that are different to what you would expect I love his novel he knew he was right which doesn't end in a marriage like many many Victorian novels do but begins with a marriage and follows the sort of fall out and dysfunctionality of this marriage when the husband starts to believe that his wife is having an affair so many Victorian books are about courtship and this is a book about marriage and such a complicated and interesting way I also love the small house Allington which is one of my favorite books by him because the ending is so utterly wonderful and because there are so many things about this book that like break so many conventions and it's just awesome it is also one of the reasons why I do have to say that dr. Thorne is one of my least favorite books by Anthony Trollope although dr. Thorne the third book in the Bosch The Chronicle seems to be most people's favorite Anthony Trollope book and there for me it's much more conventional than the rest of his books and I think that's a shame however despite the fact that I think their overall plot in dr. Thorne is a little bit more conventional than asked though unconventional things in it such as the fact that he has in a character who is a baronet who started off as a working-class man has built himself up and also in Kollek like so many things that you don't tend to find in a Victorian novel his books are very different to a lot of other Victorian novels and that's something I really really enjoy which leads me on fairly nicely I think to my number four which is his themes he has so many of fascinating themes that he deals with in his work chess politics and the sort of divisions between high and low church and the position of clergyman within society is a really really important theme in the blush The Chronicles and one thing that the pastor Chronicles deals with really interestingly is morality and clergyman and if you are a clergyman if you are a vicar do you have a right to be more moral than other people and should you be expected to be more moral than other people such fascinating discussions and morality turn up in so many of his books Heaney who was right it's also a book about marriage and Trust and morality the way we live now is a book about money and power and class and politics and modernization and what it means to be Victorian his books are very very very current for the time they were written not in that they're not interesting and fascinating and accessible now but in that they deal so much with issues that fascinated the Victorians his books are often a wonderful beautiful love stories that he also uses these love stories to explore important and interesting themes of class of gender of respectability versus wealth of the powers and dangers of money about capitalism about kindness about old-fashioned values versus newer values like there are so many wonderful fascinating thing is going on in his books but I just yeah they're wonderful they're very very wonderful number five I want to talk about his realism and his characterization in general although I love Dickens for the fact that he's not a realist and for the fact that his books are absurd and mad and a lot of his characters are exaggerated and put to extremes although there's something I adore in Dickens I also really like the reverse and one thing I quite like about Anthony Trollope I one of the reasons why I find him quite an interesting writer to compare the Dickens is because he is not that his characters are not exaggerated so he tries to write about situations that could happen and he tries to make his characters very very realistic I really mean love the realism of his works and I suppose it's something I enjoy and Elizabeth Gaskell as well while I love the Victorian absurd writers like Dickens I also think that the Victorian realists have a lot of really interesting things to say about the world and has to find the realism of Anthony Thomas books to make them so so emotionally engaging and these characters I would say realistic and one of the ways in which they're thoroughly realistic is a lot dumber flawed there are a lot of nasty people in his books there are a lot of people you don't like but even the characters you don't like have a side that you can sympathize with and have difficulties that you can understand for example mrs. Prudie in the Basra Chronicles is on the surface not a very nice woman but also she is presented at times very sympathetically and you do understand that as this incredibly intelligent woman in a society where she can't really do much with her intelligence no wonder she rules over her husband because she thinks she could do his job better than him or Georgiana Longstaff in the way we live now who declares that she will marry the first man who comes along with 5,000 pounds she is mercenary and she is shallow but the reason why she says she will marry the first man who comes along is because she is 29 years old she's been out in society for 10 years she finds her family difficult to live with and she dreads the prospect of a life where she never gets to have a house of her own when she never gets to be a wife and have all the opportunities that for a Victorian woman comes with that like his characters even when you are frustrated with them are very understandable and feel very very real and that's one of the things that is amazing about his books number six I want to talk about his authorial voice there's something about Antony Charlotte this voice and the way he writes his books and the way every now and then he intrudes on the narrative to tell you what he thinks of his characters and also sometimes just to give you a hint about what's happening in the end just so you're reassured if you were really worried about anything particular that might happen I find it really really endearing and I find it really enjoyable and it makes me really trust him as a writer and feel very happy with the way his plots going to go and I do trust him I think he is one of those writers that I have no gripes with and that I never have anything to criticise in his books I know I said that dr. Thorne is a bit conventional for me for example but I think it's a still a really really great book and I'm not sure there is a another choice in that story that would have made it better but like actually trollop is one of those writers where he never seems to make choices that I disagree with I'm like Dickens who I love so so much and there are so many things I adore about Dickens his books and I also slightly love being angry at Dickens sometimes when he does things in his books that frustrate me but Anthony Trollope never seems to do anything it was straight to me whenever I expect him to do something that's gonna frustrate me and to take the plot in the wrong direction he just like pulls it all back into the right way I wanted it to be a bit amazing and it's great and it's great and the final thing I want to talk about which leads on fairly nicely I suppose from comparing the Dickens is that I finds Antony trollop in general not as problematic as a lot of Victorian authors which is always nice obviously I love Victorian that's a lot and also because a very very interested in the time period I'm also fairly aware of different social and moral views which lead to various things in books and I know that in many cases they thought quite differently to us but despite that it can still be hard and difficult when you're reading Victorian books and you encounter sexism and racism and so many other things some of which are kind of worse than the general mood at the time and some of which are kind of just along with the general mood at the time another sweet on up in general is an author who I find fairly enlightened in many ways and I don't think I've ever encountered anything sexist in the Anthony Trollope books that I've read and although there are characters who are quite racist in general Anthony Trollope it's critical of those characters for example in the way we live now there are quite a lot of characters who are quite anti-semitic towards a few other characters an anti neutral is critical of anti-semitism and critical of parents favoring their sons over their daughters and critical of the Anglican Church looking down on the Catholic Church and so many things like that which are very very interesting and always quite nice to encounter in a Victorian novelist so there we go those are seven reasons why I love Anthony Trollope and now let's talk about the books by him that I've read I'm gonna start off by talking about Christmas at Thompson Hall this is a short story collection so I feel slightly different to the rest of them and one that I really really did enjoy there are some lovely stories in here a lot of them are maybe slightly more conventional than some of these novels there's a lot of love stories and a lot of quite funny comic stories the first one in this collection is very very funny I would definitely recommend this collection next Christmas probably as it is quite Christmas Eve but yeah a really fun read it also want to mention his novel Rachael Ray this it must be said is a book that I haven't read for quite a long time I really really loved it at the time that I read it when I was like maybe 16 17 and I don't remember it that well but I do remember that it's a really nice love story and that it's set around a brewery which I found really interesting for some point I will be rereading that I think and it's not a very long one but in that sense I think it's quite a good place to start because it's a bit shorter it's a bit less intense thematically than some of the rest of his books and it's more of a nice quiet love story definitely one I'd recommend next I want to talk about two books by him that I always kind of put too in my head mostly I think because they were the first two books by him that I read and I can't actually remember which one I read first and these are he knew he was right and the way we live now he knew who was right is a wonderful wonderful book and I'd really really like to reread actually because I haven't read it again since I was a teenager though I remember it I fell or better than Rachael Ray possibly with help from the television adaptation bond made on the BBC which is excellent as well he knew he was right it's a fascinating book I know I mentioned it earlier but it starts with a marriage and then slowly you see the marriage fall apart as the husband begins to think that his wife is having an affair with an older man who is a friend of her father's and their relationship in the book and their complete lack of communication and both of their pride and her anger at him and his anger at her is just so so utterly good it's so so interesting in terms of examining Victorian marriage and in terms of examining sort of gender and we're powerful in marriage and as well as this main central plotline there are so many other wonderful side characters who I love just I can't recommend enough it's it's absolutely absolutely brilliant but then there is the way we live now which is I'm gonna say my favorite Anthony Trollope book and a really really wonderful wonderful book this takes as its kind of central point the male moths a family who turn up in London a father and mother and their daughter and they have a lot of money but no one knows really where they're from or where they got their money from or if they even got it legally they're not very respectable they're a bit vulgar but they have money so everyone starts to visit them and it follows the Mel Watts and mr. Mel not sort of fortune and his capitalist ventures but also various characters who turn up around this fortune and end up involved with it including the Carberry family lady Carberry her sons the Felix and her daughter Henrietta they have titled but they're very very impoverished because Sir Felix is a terrible terrible man and a drunken gambler but he decides that he would quite like a lot of money and so maybe he'll try and marry mr. Mel's daughter and things go on from there a fascinating book in terms of its presentation of Victorian capitalism and money and sort of tradition versus modernity or 1875 modernity and morality and love versus duty and so many wonderful things and the ending is just as great is so great it's really really great and then the other six books by him I've read all the part of the Bassett show calls the bar searcher chronicles are wonderful because there are series of six interconnected novels most of the books here with new characters and new stories but various characters crop up in other people's stories and your spot characters who you've met in previous novels and then like the final novel in the series kind of ties it all together and brings in so many characters that you've met before and it's just wonderful you do need to read them in order I know a lot of people do ask me this and I would say absolutely you do if you ever want to read them all you can probably read most of the books individually and understand them except for maybe the last and possibly Barchester towers but the rest you could all read individually to understand them but they all like spoil the last book in some ways I would highly recommend reading them in order so we start off with this little book the warden which looks at what happens when a man who's a warden of an arms house suddenly has his calling and the money he gets for doing what he's doing called into question and the will that left him this Duty called into question is about morality and church politics and family life and responsibilities and it's really a really wonderful and definitely worth a read a lot of people start the series with the warden and don't love expand it a bit dry I don't find it dry because I'm very interested in Victorian church politics but if you're not all I would say is that you should read the warden quickly and then immediately afterwards pick up but just the towers the next in the series to get you properly into the series Barchester towers I think is a more accessible novel than the warden and an absolutely wonderful one doing fascinatingly and unconventionally with life in this war Victorian town a lot of church politics again but also a love stories and stories about family and in love that the main heroine and this is a woman in her late 20s with a baby because that's an unconventional Victorian heroine and that makes me very happy and we have dr. thorn which I've already mentioned which follows a young woman called Mary thorn she is in love with a man called Frank Gresham who is fairly above her in society and who loves her too that is told by his parents that he has to marry an heiress Mary is not an heiress she has no money and she was also born out of wedlock and she lives with her uncle dr. Thorne and the book is partly about Mary and Frank's relationship and partly about dr. thorn and the difficulties he faces in his feelings of duty and morality and also his deep love for his niece and it's about class and is about money and it's about so many other things like I said it's not my favorite in the series because I find the plot a little bit more there's not but I do think it's though a very very enjoyable read next up is family parsonage another wonderful book this follows a young man a parson called mr. Roberts he has a wife and a few young children and he's a clergyman and on the one hand he's happy with his life and on the other hand he'd quite like to be involved in society more because society is shiny and nice and exciting but he ends up involved kind of with the wrong people in society and that is the main plot point in the book and another plot going on in the book relates to his sister and her kind of relationship with a man who is a bit above her in society and then the fifth book in the series and my favorite in the series and my second favorite man just control it but is the small house at Arlington which I adore though he said I'm gonna do at last the Chronicles week at some point later in the year and talk about these more in depth but I love this book very much it follows two sisters and their various romantic relationships and family dramas it also follows some of the four men around the sisters including one called John Eames who is like my favorite character and Ansley Trollope who is so so very very very well drawn it's brilliant it's brilliant it's so brilliant and finally in the series is the last chronicle of Bastet which kind of brings everything together and features a lot of characters from the previous books its main plot focuses on a family we've met previously and what happens when a clergyman is accused of stealing a check and how society reacts to it and how he reacts to it so John Eames is my favorite mr. Crawley is one of the best drawn characters in all of literature and the way Anthony Trollope deals with his kind of mental health issues in some ways his depression but also with his kind of stoicism and the way he treats his life and sometimes you're so frustrated with the way mr. Crawley acts but you also really understand him it's a beautiful brilliant wonderful book and I love how it deals with so many of the characters you've met previously it met all my expectations and went beyond them and it was just absolutely wonderful so there we have it that is my video on Anthony Trollope I can't recommend him enough as an author if you're looking for where to start with Anthony Trollope I would say Rachel Ray it's a nice one to start with or also the Barchester Chronicles but like I said I highly recommend buying first both the warden and Barchester towers and reading them both back-to-back because I think that will get you more into the world and the series and those two do share a lot of characters and lead quite nicely into each other I also think that he knew who is right and the way they live now are excellent places to start but they are also a bit longer so you might not want to pick them up as your first one that's it thank you very much for watching please let me know down the comments if you've read and the Anthony Trollope and what you think of him and I'll be back very soon with another bookish video

Channel: Books and Things

Views: 15,997

Keywords: booktube, books, literature

Id: DoaTbQKSSg4

Length: 17min 37sec (1057 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2018