Victorian Autobiography - Robert D. Aguirre (essay date fall 2002)
Robert D. Aguirre (essay date fall 2002)
SOURCE: Aguirre, Robert D. “Cold Print: Professing Authorship in Anthony Trollope's An Autobiography.” Biography 25, no. 4 (fall 2002): 569-92.
[In the following essay, Aguirre probes the relationship between the writer, authorial identity, and the realities of the literary marketplace with regard to Anthony Trollope's An Autobiography.]
Trollope's An Autobiography is an anomaly, a work of self-representation best known for its frank view of the literary marketplace: “Brains that are unbought will never serve the public much” (107).1 Such disquieting candor has led critics to posit not one autobiography but two—the real thing and a poor relation. The first tells a familiar Victorian story of a sensitive and self-conscious child's journey through poverty and social exclusion. Like Dickens, whose biography he had read (Trollope, Letters 2: 557), Trollope here...
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