Anthony Trollope has come down to us as the most Victorian of Victorian novelists, who perfected a "bluff, roast-beef kind of Englishness" into high--and immensely popular--art. Glendinning ushers readers into the furthest reaches of Trollope's work and life to reveal a man of extraordinary depth and liveliness. Photos.

David Skilton examines the literary background against which Trollope wrote, and shows how this criticism controlled the novelist's creativity. He then goes on to examine Trollope's particular type of realism in the context of the theories of literary imagination current in the 1860s.