'Trollope Trending'

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/trollope-trending

• Novelists of manners, like Thackeray, die as their manners age; in Trollope, we see the social forces that make manners happen, and these—the permanent appetite for power and prestige—change much less. That’s why, despite the dated subjects, the books don’t date.
• Trollope is not a sentence-by-sentence writer, or even a scene-by-scene writer; really, he is a character-by-character writer.
• In Trollope’s fiction, even the most small-scale and homely stories ave as a background this special crisis of modernization—not the crisis of industrialization and mass immiseration, seen by Dickens, but a crisis of institutions, produced by reform and standardization... Efficiency demands set standards; set standards demand equality of measure; equality of measure demands reform. It is a simple formula but is at the heart of modern change, whether benign or tending toward the totalitarian.
• Politics are possible in the church, as in the university, because power is dispersed and the combatants are protected from dismissal.
• This division of power, Trollope understands, is not just an aspect of politics—it is a precondition of politics. (This is why there are, in almost every American business, no “office politics” properly so called; there are merely court intrigues.)
• Politics, in Trollope’s view, is less a fight for the middle than a constant struggle to define the ordinary.
• You could write a book about books by good writers that draw people who don’t really like that writer—Bellow’s “Seize the Day,” Roth’s “The Ghost Writer,” Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend,” Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song.”
• Trollope’s own political manifesto is neatly succinct: “Liberals think it to be for the welfare of the people and the good of the country that distances should be reduced and gradually annihilated. The Conservative thinks it to be for the good that he should maintain the great ‘distance’ or degree of difference which divides the Duke from the laborer.” Trollope is also clear that these “distances” to be reduced are not merely the hereditary ones that filled his England: “Accumulating wealth will re-create the distances almost as fast as they are dissolved by popular energy.”
• George Eliot has a nobler mind, but her sympathies are so broad that they are essentially planetary: she sees, beautifully, from high above.