SOURCE: Aguirre, Robert D. “Cold Print: Professing Authorship in Anthony Trollope's An Autobiography.” Biography 25, no. 4 (fall 2002): 569-92.

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 succumbs to the “famous Victorian novelist hysteria syndrome,” in which authors “rewrite the past with themselves as lonely victims” (Sutherland, “Unhappy” 20). The second turns to the idols of the marketplace: profits, markets, and relations with publishers. At points, the narrative yields to mere calculation: pages per day, novels per year, and profits per novel.² Famously, this autobiography includes a table listing all Trollope's works and their profits down to the pence, a wry turn on publishers' advertisements that featured the prices for each novel in an author's oeuvre.³ Early reviewers were appalled. One complained that in the author's “needless crudity of phrase” the “literary ideal is brutalized indeed” (“Anthony” 47), and Henry James wrote that Trollope, lacking an aesthetic system, “never troubled his head … with theories about the nature of his business” (1332). More recently, Mary Hamer remarks that “the scrupulous arithmetical detail in which his output is planned and recorded owes something to a foible of personality” (189), and Peter Allen observes that Trollope seems “obsessed with the issue of his own social advancement, and delighted to describe the mechanical stratagems he has employed to obtain it” (4).⁴

Trollope's accounting, however, does not signal the failure of autobiography, but a recognition of its inseparability from the material conditions of authorship itself. For Victorian writers, these conditions included the system of copyright, beginning with the Copyright Amendment Act of 1842, which extended the period of protection to forty-two years from publication or seven years from the death of the author, whichever was longer; the development of a “star-system” guaranteeing certain writers a commanding market share;⁵ and the formation of literary societies that helped authors establish a collective identity as literary professionals. An Autobiography explores these and other issues to demystify the economic milieu in which authors lived and moved as professionals. Moreover, the text's focus on the self as a figure of writing and the owner of writing constitutes an important revision of dominant Victorian middle-class autobiographical practice, with its emphasis on autonomy, interiority, and conversion tropes—as much as, though in a different key, the working-class autobiographies examined by critics such as Regenia Gagnier. The critique focuses on the dilemma of newly professionalized authors—free to create fictional worlds, yet also contingent, forced to submit to economic forces beyond their control. Its embodiment in a work of autobiography also raises important questions about the genre's status as a record of the writer's life, questions that go to the heart of the author's relation to the work.⁶

Post-structuralist work on the status of the author has its origin in two now famous essays: Roland Barthes's “The Death of the Author” (1968) and Michel Foucault's “What is an Author?” (1969). In a flash of bravado, Barthes declares writing to be “the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin … that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (142). Questioning the author's status as an autonomous genius, Barthes overturns a series of hierarchical oppositions, privileging “writing” over “voice,” “text” over “work,” “destination” over “origin,” “scriptor” over “author.” Only language speaks, not the author (143), and when narration begins, “the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death” (142). Foucault, by contrast, argues that we must not cancel out the author, but rather “seize its functions, its intervention in discourse, and its system of dependencies” (138). Foucault traces the relationship between author and discourse to eighteenth-century economic and legal shifts that, along with the legal codification of discourse as intellectual property, led to the regulation of writing itself. “Speeches and books,” he writes, “were assigned real authors … only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive” (124). Foucault thus focuses attention on the legal and economic conditions for authorship, and on “the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act of writing” (125).

Foucault looms over recent attempts to situate the author in economics and law. Mark Rose, for example, suggests that the author is at bottom a “proprietor … the originator and therefore the owner of a special kind of commodity, the ‘work’” (54). Like Foucault, Rose traces the emergence of the modern author to the eighteenth century, when a combination of philosophical and legal developments led to the recognition of an author's words as property. The idea that authors might “own” their words is already latent in Locke's axiom, in the Two Treatises on Government (1690), that “every Man has a Property in his own Person” (305). In his analysis of the landmark copyright case of Donaldson v. Becket (1774), Rose argues that the nineteenth-century understanding of the author emerged from a fusion of enlightenment concepts of individual particularity with “the romantic elaboration of such notions as originality, organic form, and the work of art as the expression of the unique personality of the artist.” Philosophical and aesthetic ideas of originality constituted “the necessary completion of the legal and economic transformation that occurred during the copyright struggle” (76). Similarly, Martha Woodmansee writes that it is in the “interplay between legal, economic, and social questions on the one hand and philosophical and esthetic ones on the other” that “critical concepts and principles as fundamental as that of authorship achieved their modern form” (440).⁷

The nineteenth century also witnessed “the crystallization of the professional ideal as a separate entity” (Perkin, Origins 428), as throughout the period, an array of professions were codified and regulated.⁸ In 1828 the Institution of Civil Engineers was formed, later splintering into the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (1847), of Naval Architects (1860), and of Electrical Engineers (1871). The Society of Accountants was created in Edinburgh in 1854; by 1880, five English associations combined to form the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales (Burn 285). In 1858, the Medical Act created basic standards for the profession of medicine. And in 1884, Walter Besant established the Society of Authors, which sought to advance the profession of authorship through “(1) the maintenance, definition, and defence of literary property; (2) the consolidation and amendment of the laws of domestic copyright; (3) the promotion of international copyright” (216). As Besant put it, no one calls that “barrister unworthy of the Bar who expects large fees in proportion to his name and his ability; nor does any one call that painter a tradesman whose price advances with his reputation” (226). For along with the legal protections of copyright, professionalization helped transform authors into proprietors who are free to sell their intellectual property—their writing—to the highest bidder. Indeed, what binds professions together is an ideology about work, “the degree to which they, as occupations rather than classes, have gained the organized power to control themselves the terms, conditions and content of their work in the settings where they perform their work” (Friedson 22).

Yet, protecting the “terms, conditions and content” of labor is only necessary in a society that threatens the control over production. In a defensive strategy designed to secure the value of their specialized knowledge, the professions organized themselves into disciplines, defining their own identities, discursive strategies, and internal practices against both the general public and other disciplines. For “based on human capital,” professional society is “enhanced by strategies of closure” (Perkin, Rise 2). According to Edward Said, this means that within the context of the professions, “You have to pass through certain rules of accreditation, you must learn the rules, you must speak the language, you must master the idioms and you must accept the authorities of the field … to which you want to contribute” (141). If disciplines control what is said and who says it, the huddling behavior of the professions is therefore a strategy for preserving the right to speak.

In the post-Enlightenment period particularly, autobiography plays an essential role in producing professional subjectivities. Both Wordsworth and Carlyle, for example, wrote at a moment in cultural history when literature had become “an exchange of texts for money between parties with no extratextual knowledge of each other” (Corbett 40). As the number of writers increased, and the relations between readers and authors became more impersonal, authors sought to establish their uniqueness through writing autobiographical accounts. But autobiography, of course, produces the very individuality it purports only to describe. In this regard, authors who write for pay have much in common with other professionals. “Most professions,” writes Eliot Friedson, “produce intangible goods. Their product, in other words, is only formally alienable and is inextricably bound to the person and the personality of the producers.” As a result, “the producers themselves have to be produced if their products or commodities are to be given a distinctive form” (32). To speak of a “Dickensian” novel or a “Tennysonian” lyric is thus to name the quality that makes each writer unique.

Unlike, say, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1836), which heralded this emergence of the author even as it fashioned a narrative of its genesis, Trollope's posthumously published autobiography, written forty years later, did not produce his professional self, but commented retrospectively on his career, disclosing the professional ideologies and practices by which he had attained his fame. Since “literary criticism has in the present day become a profession” (261), in An Autobiography Trollope unabashedly offers a tabular accounting of his profits, both as testament to “persevering diligence in my profession” (364), and as upholding the crucial principle that an author is a literary professional who is paid for his labor. That diligence was also revealed in the now famous work habits, the maniacal control over textual production. Gearing himself to a discipline at once industrial and Protestant, he turned “these hours to more account” (103). He described his “system of writing” (102) as resting on his capacity to “bind myself to certain self-imposed laws” (118), and he sought to make his textual production as regular as the trains he rode to his job at the Post Office. Indeed, his method mimics the power and efficiency of that industrial icon, the steam engine. Twenty to forty pages a week was his aim, but as “a page is an ambiguous term,” he decided that all pages would be “made to contain 250 words”—with every word counted to keep himself honest (119).⁹ Once Trollope mastered the problem of sheer volume, he also controlled the precise rate of production, employing a manservant to awaken him exactly at 5:30 a.m. to begin the day's work. “It had become my custom,” he observed, “to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour” (272). In the tradition of Crusoe enumerating his supplies and Franklin his tasks, Trollope's zeal for counting suggests the tabulative mentality that Weber found at the very heart of capitalism (186-202), yet also goes far toward demystifying the labor of writing for pay. If one wants to thrive by the pen, Trollope seems to say, one must think as much like a businessman as an artist. Indeed, the self-imposed regime allowed him to take advantage of specific features of Victorian publishing: the steady growth in the reading public and lending libraries, the rise of serial publication, and a new entrepreneurial ethos that allowed authors to gain greater control over the processes of production.¹⁰

Among Victorian authors, Trollope is by far the most blunt about business matters. “Take away from English authors their copyrights,” he writes, “and you would very soon take away also from England her authors” (107). Yet, several Victorian writers before Trollope had used autobiography to explore the complex relations between the authorial self, professionalism, and the material reality of writing as property. Some even appear to equate biography with bibliography—a sign of the tension between the competing identity-models of the professional and the spiritual autobiographer. The later portions of John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, for example, resemble a list of works published. After narrating his “mental crisis,” Mill turns away from the notion that autobiography should disclose the hidden self, and to a discussion of the self in print. “I have no further mental changes to tell of,” he begins the final chapter, “but only, as I hope, a continued history, and the results of which, if real, will be best found in my writings” (132). The text then records the writing, publication, and reception of each of Mill's works. “The first use I made of the leisure which I gained by disconnecting myself from the [Edinburgh] Review, was to finish the Logic [i.e. A System of Logic (1843)],” Mill recalls, proceeding next to a discussion of the publication of his Principles of Political Economy: “The rapid success of the Political Economy showed that the public wanted, and were prepared for such a book. Published early in 1848, an edition of a thousand copies was sold in less than a year. Another similar edition was published in the spring of 1849; and a third, of 1250 copies, early in 1852” (140). And so forth. For Mill, then, his “continued history” lies in his published writings, the textual corpus of the author. Taking shelter in the public—and published—man, Mill leads us away from the life to the already printed record of the life work. As did his contemporary, John Ruskin. In Fors Clavigera, Ruskin narrates the authorwork relation in much the same way: “At twenty, I wrote Modern Painters; at forty, Unto this Last; at fifty, the Inaugural Oxford Lectures; and if Fors Clavigera is ever finished as I mean it—it will mark the mind I had at sixty” (27: 137). The list, the catalogue, the bibliography: these are not narrative forms, but rather inventories of productivity, the professional's summary of achievements and worth.¹¹

A particularly complex instance of the author-work relation occurs in the life and fiction of William Makepeace Thackeray, Trollope's avowed master. Like Trollope, Thackeray represented authorship in economic terms. An 1859 letter to his mother, for instance, outlines his detailed plans for rebuilding the inheritance he squandered in his twenties:

If I can work for 3 years now, I shall have put back my patrimony and a little over—after 30 years of ups and downs. I made a calculation the other day of receipts in the last 20 years and can only sum up about £32000 of moneys actually received—for wh. I have values of disbursements of 13000—so that I have spent at the rate of more than 1000 a year for 20 years. The profits of the lectures figure as the greatest of the receipts £9500—Virginians 6—Vanity Fair only 2. 3 years more please the Fates—and the girls will then have the 8 or 10000 a piece that I want for them.

(Letters 4: 155)

The work is reduced to its price, which in turn is recalculated in terms of the inheritance he hopes to leave behind for his children. A patrimony inherited, lost, regained through writing, and passed on again becomes the economic narrative of his career. In his 1879 study of Thackeray for Macmillan's English Men of Letters series, Trollope shows that he was aware of and sympathetic to Thackeray's equation. Among Trollope's working papers is a questionnaire, seeking confirmation of certain facts, that he sent to Anne Thackeray Ritchie. The following item is typical: “He told me shortly before his death that he was worth then exactly the sum of money which he inherited on coming of age. He named a sum. I think it was £30,000” (qtd. in Trollope, Letters 2: 812n). In his book on Thackeray, Trollope clearly follows this compressed accounting of his subject's career. While observing that Thackeray had achieved a secure footing in his career by 1848, Trollope noted that still he felt his position to be “precarious, and he was always thinking of what he owed to his two girls” (33). Trollope closes his biographical chapter by reporting that not only had Thackeray “succeeded in replacing the fortune he had lost” but had actually done better, leaving 750 pounds behind him (58). That he did so by means of lecturing, considered a step down from the noble calling of literature, brought no condemnation from Trollope, for “when we talk of sordid gain and filthy lucre, we are generally hypocrites. If gains be sordid and lucre filthy, where is the priest, the lawyer, the doctor, or the man of literature, who does not wish for dirty hands?” (Thackeray 44). For Thackeray, as for Trollope, there is no inherent contradiction in viewing a career in economic terms. By ultimately paying his debt to himself and his daughters, Thackeray's career/life succeeds. As we shall see below, the problem of debt also beset Trollope, and like Thackeray, he wrote himself out of it.

Although not listed in Thackeray's letter to his mother, The History of Pendennis, which he published serially between 1848-50, contains one of the Victorian period's most significant and controversial discussions of the life of authorship, including the idea, later endorsed by Trollope, that “writers are and should be governed by the same economic realities as the rest of the world” (Howes 283). In language that Trollope would echo, Thackeray describes a pivotal encounter between young Pen and his friend Warrington, a hack journalist who in chapter 30 shows him the “‘great engine’” of the newspaper office, with her “‘ambassadors in every quarter of the world—her couriers upon every road’” (356).¹² In the next chapter, “In which the Printer's Devil Comes to the Door,” Pen's friend reveals his profession: “‘George Warrington writes for bread’” (359). As several critics have discussed, the novel's account of mercenary journalism provoked a violent reaction in the periodical press, and spurred the “Dignity of Literature” debate, which took up issues of writing for pay, professionalism, and literary merit.¹³ An editorial in The Morning Chronicle of 3 January 1850, while arguing against state pensions for starving writers, articulated a widely held view, that “the genius which deserves to be encouraged does not wait for or require encouragement; and its self-dependence—its capacity for making its own way against all obstacles—is the best criterion of its genuineness” (qtd. in Lund 62). Other newspapers and periodicals followed suit. The Prospective Review complained that Pen, Thackeray's hero, was undisciplined because he had escaped the “necessity of making a livelihood in a regular way” (qtd. in Lund 63). Such criticism brought forth a strong counterreaction from Thackeray, who, as Howes points out, not only responded with a letter to The Morning Chronicle, but used the gap provided by serial publication (extended in this instance by his own illness) to respond to these charges within Pendennis. Howes argues that Thackeray initially overstates the case that writing is no different from other work, but that in subsequent chapters, and particularly “Contains a Novel Incident” (ch. 41), he “attempts to rectify this mistake by showing just how art's creative dimension adapts itself to survive with integrity in the world of commerce” (291). The result is the emergence of a matured vision, a synthesis of “pre-market” and “post-market” subjectivities and stances toward authorship (293).

Though Trollope held similar views, by employing some of the tropes Thackeray used to describe hack journalism, he placed greater emphasis on the business side of things. Howes points out that in an 1846 review, “A Brother of the Press on the History of Literary Man, Laman Blanchard, and the Chances of the Literary Profession,” Thackeray compared the laboring writer to a bootblack (274). In An Autobiography, Trollope drew a similar comparison, observing that just as it would be absurd for the shoemaker or even the tallow-chandler to wait for the muse, so aspiring writers should stay seated at their desks until the day's work is done (121). In the same way, Thackeray's description of Warrington writing “for bread” reverberates throughout Trollope's account of authorship. In Thackeray, Trollope included authorship as one of the professions in “which a crust can be earned” (11), and in the Autobiography he cautioned those who would “enter boldly on a literary career in search of bread” (212). And discussing American piracy of his work, in a famous 1862 letter to James Russell Lowell—subsequently published in the Athenaeum—Trollope referred to himself, Lowell, and other authors as men who “earn our bread by writing” (Trollope, Letters 1: 194). Though Trollope was quite successful at this time, the phrase recalls Thackeray's description of the unfortunate Fleet Street denizens who write to stay alive, to keep food on the table.¹⁴ Margaret Oliphant, as famous for her industry as Trollope, gave the trope a feminine slant. In her autobiography (1899), she called writing her “daily labour” (67) and the “boiling of the daily pot” (131), figures that capture her confined domesticity and the conflict between writing and child rearing. And she, too, felt the conflict of commodification: “I feel all this to be so vulgar, so common, so unnecessary, as if I were making pennyworths of myself” (75). And yet she continued to write, earning her bread.

For Trollope, the correspondence between bibliography and biography provokes an acute anxiety about subjectivity itself. The fear stems from feeling entirely bound up with one's works, identified with their success, and even their failure. What makes An Autobiography so compelling as a document of the author-work relation is Trollope's willingness to interrogate the sources of this anxiety, and in the words of Foucault cited above, to “seize its functions” and “its system of dependencies.” To understand how these anxieties function in the text, we must first examine its narrative structure—particularly the apparent split between confession and managerial inventory, but also the powerful gender dynamics that govern male narratives of achievement in this period.

Narratives of personal achievement, according to Peter Brooks, derive from the constructing power of ambition, which provides a design for narrative and psychological coherence. For Brooks, ambition “is inherently totalizing, figuring the self's tendency to appropriation and aggrandizement, moving forward through the encompassment of more, striving to have, to do, and to be more.” It is figured most emphatically in the desiring hero of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, a genre closely affiliated to autobiography (39). For the hero to achieve success, he must confront forces antagonistic to his consuming belief in himself, such as poverty and class barriers. When he masters these difficulties, the hero realizes his aim and secures a mature identity. Of course, this is not a universal paradigm, but a gendered one, relying on a model of textual erotics derived by analogy to male pleasure only. In a searching critique of Brooks, Susan Winnett argues that the paradigm speaks principally to “what men want, how they go about trying to get it, and the stories they tell about this pursuit” (506).¹⁵ The desiring hero/narrator of David Copperfield, for example, describes his vocational path in tropes that conjoin desire, self-discipline, aggression, and sexual conquest:

What I had to do was to turn the painful discipline of my younger days to account, by going to work with a resolute and steady heart. What I had to do, was, to take my woodman's axe in my hand, and clear my own way through the forest of difficulty, by cutting down the trees until I came to Dora.

(582; ch. 36)

Similarly, in Great Expectations, Pip's “expectation” is equally engrossing, tainting even his love for Estella, for he admits that “Truly it was impossible to dissociate her presence from all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had disturbed my boyhood—from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had first made me ashamed of home and Joe” (225; ch. 29). Consuming desire both enables his upward mobility and feeds his base, “wretched hankerings,” propelling the narrative and slackening it, as Pip repeatedly returns to the Forge to confront the contradictions of his restless ambition.

The ambition narrative often tempts the hero with what Brooks calls a “short circuit,” a premature end that threatens to divert the protagonist from his proper love object (109). For Trollope, who downplays romance in favor of professional development, two detours stand out: one a farm, the other a book. In unexpected ways, these detours also subvert the gendered assumptions of the male progress narrative. These symbols suggest the narrative's turn from the disgrace of the father, who failed at farming and authorship, to a successful countermodel in the mother, who exemplifies the path to professional success. The beginning of An Autobiography maps the struggle of the individual self against a series of inimical social forces. “My boyhood,” Trollope writes, was as “unhappy as that of a young gentleman could well be, my misfortunes arising from a mixture of poverty and gentle standing on the part of my father, and from an utter want on my own part of that juvenile manhood which enables some boys to hold up their heads even among the distresses which such a position is sure to produce” (2). Like Dickens's father, the elder Trollope combined pretensions of gentility with a special gift for losing money. His disastrous choice to take over a farm at Harrow in 1813, the unanticipated loss of a legacy in 1820, a severe agricultural depression in 1827, and an unfortunate habit of alienating legal clients—all these combined to wreck the financial hopes of the Trollopes, culminating in the public disgrace of forced repossession. Trollope juxtaposes his father's failures with his mother's successes. Writing that “the touch of his hand seemed to create failure” (31), Trollope describes the farm as “the grave of all my father's hopes, ambition, and prosperity, the cause of my mother's sufferings, and of those of her children, and perhaps the director of her destiny and of ours” (2). The farm seems forever to be in “danger of falling into the neighbouring horse-pond. As it crept downwards from house to stables, from stables to barns, from barns to cowsheds, and from cowsheds to dung-heaps, one could hardly tell where one began and the other ended” (11-12). The farm embodies downward mobility, a point not lost on Trollope's schoolboy peers, who made him feel that he had no right, as a “wretched farmer's boy, reeking from a dunghill, to sit next to the sons of big tradesman who had made their ten thousand a-year” (12). Trollope's deepest childhood memories are therefore caught up with distinctions of class, profession, and wealth, and the narrative replays these scenes to accentuate the difference between the adult narrator who writes and the child-subject who acts. The narrator stands as proof that the child has successfully avoided the detour.

Yet, as devastating as the ruined farm is for young Trollope, it pales next to his father's ruinous book, which strikes much closer to home. The elder Trollope was composing an Encyclopaedia Ecclesiastica, on which “he laboured to the moment of his death” (13). The work was to “describe all ecclesiastical terms, including the denominations of every fraternity of monks and every convent of nuns” (14). When Trollope's father died, however, he had reached only the letter F, and like Casaubon's “Key to All Mythologies,” the work remained “unknown”: “buried in the midst of that huge pile of futile literature, the building up of which has broken so many hearts” (14).¹⁶ Trollope must have sympathized with his father's labors, for he too had authored fruitless projects, yet the unfinished encyclopedia reminds him of the economic perils of authorship and the dangers of authorial disintegration. For Trollope later reveals that he never allowed a book or series to remain unfinished, going even so far as to resist serial publication because it required the appearance of partially finished work. And even when he resigned himself to serialization, Trollope maintained control over production. Since it was “a principle with me in my art, that no part of a novel should be published till the entire story was completed” (138), he made sure to “have always on hand,—for some time back now,—one or two or even three unpublished novels in my desk beside me” (273). This rage for completion acts as the perfect counterpart to his father's unfinished labors; Trollope avoids failure and fragmentation by keeping his work, and in turn himself, whole and coherent.¹⁷

Against these “short circuits,” Trollope narrates the story of Mrs. Trollope, the “matrix” of his career, admired for her shrewd ability to master the brave new world of literary professionalism. While Trollope subsumes his father's story under the chapter heading “My Education,” he gives his mother a chapter heading unto herself, befitting her greater symbolic role in the bildungsroman. If the anonymous Encyclopaedia epitomizes the father's insolvency, the mother's thirty-five published volumes manifest her success, for they hoist the family out of debt. Mrs. Trollope's literary success began with her return from America in 1831, and the writing of the greatly popular Domestic Manners of the Americans. With the profits from her writing, Mrs. Trollope took the family “back to the house at Harrow,—not the first house, which would still have been beyond her means, but to that which has since been called Orley Farm, and which was an Eden as compared to our abode at Harrow Weald” (16). Trollope pointedly observes that unlike his father, with his “unknown” Encyclopedia, his mother “made for herself a considerable name in the literature of her day” (20). Her rise is measured by a change of residence to Julians, called by Trollope an “Eden.” His father's farm threatened to “fall” into the horse-pond; the new residence is symbolically linked to his own successful novel Orley Farm (1862). Though the family's financial troubles continued for some time, Trollope glosses over them as he praises his mother's industry. At Julians, he notes, “my schooling went on under somewhat improved circumstances” (16), thus resuming the forward-moving narrative of ambition and success.

Trollope reconstructs his rise to professional autonomy through a scene of writing. He recounts that shortly after arriving in London to seek a position in the Post Office, he fell deeply into debt and was forced to borrow money from a lender in Mecklenburgh Square. He sought to solve this problem by turning to authorship. Yet like Carlyle in the years before the publication of Sartor Resartus, he at first could not produce work commensurate with his ambition. Since he wrote no publishable stories, his debt clung to him, as did the lender from Mecklenburgh Square, who “was always with me in the morning,—always angering me by his hateful presence,—but when the evening came [and the opportunity to write] I could make no struggle towards getting rid of him” (53).

What interrupts this downward spiral is a classic scene of vocational awakening, a quasi-mystical epiphany that confirms the destiny of the aspiring professional. Many works contain such scenes: Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Mill's Autobiography come immediately to mind, but also Pendennis and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Trollope catches up with his destiny in Ireland, where the Post Office had sent him to inspect the financial accounts of rural postmasters. Throughout this period, he dreamt about writing more often than he put pen to paper, but as he narrates it, his first fully realized plot came to him while inspecting the books of an Irish postmaster who “had come to some sorrow about his money” (70). Trollope catches sight of “the modern ruins of a country house,” and in accounting for the misery within the “ruined walls and decayed beams” (70), he fashions the novel that launches his career. Published two years later in 1845, The Macdermots of Ballycloran sets a family's financial ruin against the context of Ireland's economic sufferings in the mid-1840s. Recalling the moment in the autobiography, Trollope observes how his youthful habit of “castle-building,” the practice of imaginative daydreaming that first fueled his desire to write, was now set on a firmer foundation: “the castle I built was among the ruins of that old house” (70). Trollope thus builds the structure of a novel that lays the first stone of his career as a professional writer.

For Trollope, and indeed many professionals, material success functions as a sign of a more intangible achievement. At several points in his autobiography, he records subtotals of moneys earned. He informs the reader, for example, that Barchester Towers and The Warden earned exactly “£727, 11s. 3d” in royalties (109). The descriptive chapter titles found at the beginning of the text give way to chapters named after novels written during a particular period, as if his life was lived in bibliographically determined sections. It is a misreading, however, to view money as Trollope's only motivation. Although economic success was a tangible index of progress, Trollope also placed great emphasis on what he called the “charms of reputation” (107), the public recognition resulting from his literary fame. This desire for celebrity sprang, in his view, from a lingering shame over his youthful poverty. Like Dickens before him, Trollope was haunted by memories of abjection for many years after having become successful. Being “known among all the boys, at a hundred yards' distance, by my boots and trousers” (16-17), ashamed of his father's failed literary efforts, and seeing himself as “the guiltiest of the guilty” (5)—these left indelible scars. At fifteen Trollope could already “appreciate at its full the misery of expulsion from all social intercourse” (11), which helps explain why he “coveted popularity” (161) and wished to “be liked” (159). Like Dickens's fixation on Warren's blacking house, Trollope focuses on the broken ruins of his youthful identity to show how his rise into authorship helped him to become whole. For writers like Trollope, Dickens, and Thackeray, the disembodied system of literary production allowed for literary works to be judged in the marketplace of ideas, on the basis of their intrinsic value. Detached from birth, class, and the body, those inexorable markers of birth and personal appearance on which social distinction rests, Trollope's successful textual identity could escape the image of the boy reeking from the dunghill.

Early in the text he recounts his first fantasies of authorship, which began with “the dangerous habit of keeping a journal” (42), and led to the practice of “castle-building” (43)—that inventing of fictional worlds, peopled with imaginary characters and locales, which offered him the chance to “live in a world altogether outside the world of my own material life” (43). Trollope suggests that the fantasy of escaping from contingency actually becomes reality through the process of literary production. Who, he asks, “is free from all shackle as to hours?” (210). It is the author, who “is subject to no bonds such as those which bind other men.” The author “may choose his own [social] circles” (210). Location of work and residence are likewise unlimited: “If you like the town, live in the town, and do your work there; if you like the country, choose the country” (209). As he wrote in his study of Thackeray, authorship “requires no capital, no special education, no training, and may be taken up at any time without a moment's delay. If a man can command a table, a chair, a pen, paper, and ink, he can commence his trade as a literary man” (10).

And yet, though Trollope often represents writing as a free and boundless activity, offering mobility and autonomy, as his own autobiography reveals, he was finally ambivalent about whether his authorial identity brought him a special agency or merely entangled him in further contingencies. While discussing the material comforts of authorship, he confesses that “I have certainly always had also before my eyes the charms of reputation. Over and above the money view of the question, I wished from the beginning to be something more than a clerk in the Post Office. To be known as somebody,—to be Anthony Trollope if it be no more,—is to me much” (107). The problem, of course, lies in the slippage between “being Anthony Trollope” and “being known as somebody.” If the two identities—the self of “being” and the self of “reputation”—are equated, then Trollope has not escaped from but only internalized the corrosive social pressures that caused him such misery as a child, when he was “known … at a hundred yards' distance” by his muddy boots and trousers (15-16). To “be known” by the public as a successful writer rather than as a filthy boy may temporarily heal old wounds, but it does not disentangle one from social life. Situating identity in the public name of author does not therefore overthrow but merely locates elsewhere the debilitating structure of “being known.”

Trollope personally confronted this problem when he decided to test his public reputation by submitting to his readership two anonymous works, Nina Balatka (1867) and Linda Tressel (1868). Increasingly conscious of a gradual disjunction between his inner self and the public “Anthony Trollope” of the title page, Trollope decided to “begin a course of novels anonymously, in order that I might see whether I could succeed in obtaining a second identity” (204). Fearing that his “name,” the social sign of his identity as a succesful author of famous novels, had outstripped the inner self it purportedly represented, Trollope worried that “a name once earned carried with it too much favour” (204). Curiously, this concern does not arise when Trollope might have benefited from a “better” name and a second identity, but after he had already successfully constructed a famous public self.

This flirtation with a second identity points to an ineluctable fact about professional authorship. To associate selfhood with the fate of one's publications is to yield identity to the complex forces that govern the life of texts in the society at large—the forces that advertise, publish, distribute, market, exchange, champion, or doom to oblivion. It is to realize that the unbounded agency of the creative mind at work loses a good measure of its autonomy once the product of the creativity, the published work, becomes identified with the person writing. Moreover, in a piquant irony, Trollope did not in fact succeed in obtaining a “second identity.” Recognizing his authorial signature in the prose style, R. H. Hutton, the keen-eyed reviewer for the Spectator, identified Trollope as the anonymous author.¹⁸ Bewildered by the attempted ruse, Hutton observes that “Mr. Trollope's name is worth a great deal in mere money value to the sale of any book.”¹⁹ In this way, Hutton identifies the fundamental issue for Trollope. When an author's name has come to guarantee a certain level of sales, how much credit should accrue to the author for the success of any literary effort? What is an author, indeed?

As Hutton's review suggests, an author's name is at once an identity, a public sign with a distinct market value, and a mark of prestige. By this time in Trollope's career, it was also a kind of advertisement, even a guarantee of value. In her study of Gaskell's relationship to the literary marketplace, Hilary Schor notes that authors publishing in Household Words had to confront the overarching power of Dickens's name: “Despite his professions of modesty, Dickens's name was everywhere in the journal (and in its publicity)—and his was, of course, the only name. All contributions to Household Words were anonymous—but Dickens's name (‘conductor of Household Words’) ran at the top of every leaf” (92).²⁰ In Victorian commodity culture generally, the mass marketing of consumer goods created a proliferation of signs whose unstable meanings led to inflated claims for the products they heralded. With the booming market for literature—and the selling of books by mass advertising—the name of the author on the title page began to exist within a complex system of signification that was related to, but never identical with, the “mere money value” noted by Hutton. To understand how names, labels, and brands acquire value as signs, we might begin with the categories Marx outlined in Capital, which drew a distinction between “use value,” defined as the use and enjoyment of a commodity in everyday life, and “exchange value,” defined as the worth of an object as determined in the marketplace (302-308). However, in an age increasingly reliant upon the semiotics of advertising, prestige is created by the artificial projection of value onto markers, which then acquire what Jean Baudrillard calls “sign value.” Names and labels have no obvious use or exchange value—they are merely signs—but we accord them prestige nonetheless. As Trollope seemed to fear, however, this artificial projection of value may be fleeting, since as Baudrillard suggests, sign value fluctuates radically within a wholly arbitrary system of differentiations and hierarchies.

Trollope was well aware of the sign value of names. At an earlier point in the autobiography, he describes his efforts to induce Longmans to give him a lump sum rather than a deferred annuity for The Three Clerks. Though acknowledging that Trollope could secure a higher price for the novel elsewhere, Mr. Longman tries to keep him from going by asking him “‘to think whether our names on your title-page are not worth more to you than the increased payment’” (109). At this point, prestige meant less to Trollope than price, and he took the novel to Bentley, who published it in 1857. But the honorary value of names clearly figured in Trollope's dealings with the marketplace. Hence his disappointment with his second identity experiment, when he learns that his books do not sell without his well-established trademark. Or as Trollope puts it: “I could not at once induce English readers to read what I gave to them, unless I gave it with my name” (206). The experiment with anonymity thus reveals the steep price of collapsing one's personal into one's authorial identity. Trollope discovers not so much that there is a gap between the private self and its public representation, but the extent of the dissociation that was always already there. Hoping to create a second identity—to free himself from his name—Trollope discovered that his success as an author was radically contingent, wedded to a publicly consumed image beyond his control.

The dilemma of the subject in print culture emerges clearly in Trollope's discussion of the question of discourse as property—he served on the Royal Commission on Copyright in 1877-78 (Letters 2: 722-23)—and to its function in what I have been suggesting is the central concern of An Autobiography: the relationship between the author and his work in an age of professionalism. This complex question informs the autobiography not simply because Trollope was concerned, like Dickens, to recover lost profits from the pirating of his works, nor because, as Andrew Miller writes, Trollope was absorbed in “issues of ownership” (173). Rather, this question signals Trollope's concern with the author's legal and economic status. For although Trollope recounts his assiduous efforts, with other British writers, to secure a copyright agreement with America (finally agreed to in 1891), his larger interest lies in the relationship between the writer and his writing.²¹ In the autobiography, Trollope argues that writers are “responsible” for their writing, and he assures his readers that he has never “taken another man's work” (115). But he also historicizes the status of words as property, noting that Shakespeare and Jonson borrowed plots and characters from earlier literature. “Plagiary existed, and was very common” then, Trollope writes; it was “not known as a sin” (116). But “It is different now”: “an author, when he uses either the words or the plot of another, should own as much, demanding to be credited with no more of the work than he has himself produced” (116). Like Foucault, Trollope understands that the selling of words as commodities—and the defining of the author in relation to these commodities—is possible only within a culture that accepts ownership, intellectual property, and authenticity as fundamental components of the author-work relation. As historians of authorship point out, central to this bond is a principle of copyright, the “institutional embodiment of the author-work relation” that not only protects the integrity of writing, but also, “by endowing it with legal reality, produces and affirms the very identity of the author as author” (Rose 54). In an 1865 article, “On Anonymous Literature,” Trollope applies this understanding as an argument against the Victorian practice of anonymous reviewing, declaring that “a man should always dare to be responsible for the work which he does, and should be ready to accept the shame, the rebuff, the ridicule, or worse than all, the indifference which will attend bad work” (491). One thinks of course of his father's failed Encyclopaedia, as well as Trollope's own early efforts, which the public greeted with indifference. Referring to this article in the autobiography, Trollope reasserts his belief in the importance of linking name and work: “I think that the name of the author does tend to honesty, and that the knowledge that it will be inserted adds much to the author's industry and care. It debars him also from illegitimate license and dishonest assertions. A man should never be ashamed to acknowledge that which he is not ashamed to publish” (192).

There is therefore something terribly ironic about Trollope's insistence that the author must sign the name to the work, for in no genre is the belief in the identity between author and work so critical as in autobiography. As Phillipe Lejeune has famously noted, this “pact” between reader and writer assures the reader that the autobiography concerns the identity of the person who is listed on the title page as its author.²² In autobiography, author and work form a unity, mirroring and producing one another. For Trollope, however, the entire relationship between author and work is fraught with consequences that destabilize the identity of the person writing, dispersing it into a polyvalent field of signs, names, and reputations. In a profound and at times disturbing examination of such fluctuating economies of meaning, Trollope comes to realize that if authorship in the marketplace enables a privileged agency, it also requires submission to responsibilities and indeed dangers inherent in the very act of writing for publication.

Notes

1. An Autobiography was published posthumously by Blackwood in 1883; for its publication history, see Hall (“Seeing”). All citations in this article are from the 1980 edition by Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page, published by Oxford University Press.

2. Philip Collins argues that Trollope's novels “might similarly carry, as an appendix, a balance sheet or profit-and-loss account, the amounts being duly carried forward in the Barchester and Palliser series” (298).

3. The 1883 American edition of Trollope's work features just such a list, printed on the reverse side of the title page. On the relation of late-twentieth century publishers' advertisements to autobiographical discourse and questions of authorship, see Douglas.

4. Of the major books on Victorian autobiography, only Machann's devotes a chapter to Trollope, and it is superficial. Super (“Truth”) and Sutherland (“Trollope”) provide detailed examinations of the many ways the text deviates from known biographical facts, particularly as measured against the author's letters and publisher's records. The critical payoff of this procedure, however, is negligible, since it is a commonplace that autobiographies distort and refashion reality for diverse rhetorical purposes. Kincaid's discussion of the text's fictional devices focuses on the shift from confessional to comic narrative, in which the author gradually becomes increasingly colorless as success is achieved. Gilead, in a psychoanalytic reading sensitive to narrative strategies of self-production, argues that the Trollopian self is “constructed as to avoid both the dangerous fluidity of uncontrolled self-process and the ideological rigidity or fairy-tale conventionality resulting from formal conversion” (275). Allen cogently makes the case that the text “seems designed as much to disrupt as to confirm the sense of Trollope's literary personality and accomplishments that his readers are likely to have formed from their knowledge of the work,” and thus approaches the text as a “direct extension of his social behavior” (2). For a broader treatment of Trollope's system of writing, see Kendrick, who underscores how the novelist “derives not from the writer but from the dreamer, the builder of castles that do not copy real life but replace it” (12); see also J. Hillis Miller on the subject of Trollope's imaginary castles. Hall (“Seeing”) treats the process by which the text was posthumously published by Trollope's son.

5. For a brilliant analysis of the star system in late twentieth century literary theory, see Shumway.

6. For the history of publishing and the development of a mass market for literature, see Altick, Feather, Leavis, and Mumby. Victorian developments are treated by Feltes, Myers, and Sutherland (Victorian Novelists).

7. The material problematics of print culture are now a central preoccupation of literary theory. See Culver on Henry James, Eilenberg on William Wordsworth, and Warner on Benjamin Franklin.

8. Standard works on the professions include Perkin (Rise), Larson, Bledstein, and Robbins. For the profession of authorship in the nineteenth century, see Gross and Cross.

9. Trollope's advice on productivity has struck at least one critic as “wholesome and useful: I myself had just read the Autobiography when I wrote my life of Walter Savage Landor many years ago, and I remained at my desk without cocktails or dinner until the day's stint of pages had been typed” (Super, “Truth” 80).

10. For Trollope's relationships with publishers, see Sutherland, Victorian Novelists (133-51).

11. Martin A. Danahay has recently explored the autobiographical function of the academic professional's curriculum vitae, relating it to issues of subjectivity in the institutionalized workplace.

12. For the larger context of bohemian life in Fleet Street, see Cross (90-125).

13. See Fielding for an overview of the controversy, and for more recent discussions, see Lund (54-55 and 59ff.), Cross (71-72) and Howes. Thackeray's response to The Morning Chronicle editorial is reprinted in Ray (2: 629-35), and Trollope reprints a portion of Thackeray's reply to John Forster's column in The Examiner for 5 Jan. 1850 (Thackeray 36-37). Andrew Miller argues that while Thackeray decried the commodification of literature, “his own engagement with material culture [particularly in Vanity Fair] leaves him deeply invested in the processes that produce the multifarious commodities surrounding him” (9). For Miller, however, while the arguments about the “Dignity of Literature” “partially defined Thackeray's work, neither its form nor its substance was finally determined by the ideology of authorial autonomy” (44).

14. This passage struck others differently: Rowland Hill, Secretary of the Post Office, took it as evidence that Trollope was neglecting his official duties (Trollope, Letters 1: 194n).

15. For subtle and sophisticated readings of women's autobiography in the period, see Corbett and Peterson.

16. Super, whose concern with factuality I have noted above, argues that Trollope unfairly disparages what was in reality a “magnificent work of scholarship” (“Truth” 76), yet Super's reading gives us no guidance as to why Trollope should have distorted the record. Gilead's willingness to read psychologically as well as factually, on the other hand, yields more fruit: “The narrator of An Autobiography is haunted by a baleful self that is both resurrected and exorcised in writing. … [T]he past self is still potent as the autobiography's cause and reason for being” (275-76). An important component of that past self, I would add, is symbolized in the father's Encyclopaedia.

17. Super points out that Trollope did in fact allow four novels to “begin publication while they were still incomplete” (“Truth” 78), but beyond making the point that the autobiography distorts the truth, Super does not pursue the significance of Trollope's claims.

18. As he tells it, Hutton merely waited for the phrase “made his way” to appear, knowing that if it referred “to walking where there is no physical difficulty or embarrassment, but only a certain moral hesitation as to the end and aim of the walking in question,” the book must be Trollope's (329). For a detailed account of Trollope's experiments with anonymity, see Knelman.

19. See Super, Chronicler 203 and also Hall, Trollope 285-90. Hutton's review appeared in The Spectator 40 (23 Mar. 1867): 329-30.

20. On the relationship in Gaskell between gender and serial publication, see Hughes and Lund 96-123.

21. For a discussion of nineteenth-century copyright issues, see Barnes.

22. Lejeune writes: “In printed texts, responsibility for all enunciation is assumed by a person who is in the habit of placing his name on the cover of the book, and on the flyleaf, above or below the title of the volume. The entire existence of the person we call the author is summed up by this name. … [W]e thus attribute to him, in the final analysis, the responsibility for the production of the whole written text” (13).

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