Update on my Trollope project

Well, this has been slow.

Several months ago I assigned myself the (pleasant) task of reading through all of Anthony Trollope’s novels, in order. It took me much longer than I expected to read through Trollope’s first novel, The McDermots of Ballycloran.

Some of the delay was caused by other events going on in my life, and some was just procrastination. In fact, I finished a quite a few other books while slowly reading this novel.

One reason for the slowness is simply the fact that much of the novel is written in dialect, which is interesting but somewhat taxing. Here's an example:

"But any how, Father John, if you'd come back, and yer riverence wouldn't mind for the onst jist sitting it out -- jist dhrinking a dhrop at an odd time, or colloguing a bit with owld Mr. Tierney, till we get the Captain out of that, shure they'd never be doing anything out of the way as long as yer riverence is in it."

You can see how that sort of thing slows you down.

Upon finishing the book, I did a little research on the nets, and discovered lots of interesting stuff.

For one thing, the folks who live in Drumsna, Ireland, have a website that includes “The Trollope Trail.” You can actually go see Headford House, the ruins that inspired Trollope to write his first novel. The village has just begun an annual Anthony Trollope Summer School, and that sounds like a good thing to put on my wish list.

My takeaway from this rereading of Trollope's first novel (I first read it about ten years ago) is that if it were all he had written he would be quite justly forgotten, although historians, both literary and non-literary, might be quite interested in the work. I can also see that all the themes that Trollope explores so well in his major works are here - class, money, sanity and insanity, the vagaries of romantic love, family, and particularly the one I find so compelling - the way great kindness manifests itself in unexpected and expected places, and makes life, which would otherwise be so very unbearable and tragic, worth living.