The English novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) wrote a series of novels that chronicle the everyday life of middle-class Victorians. Quietly humorous and at times satirical, his works reveal the vigorous and modest good nature of their author.

After the depressions and near-revolutions of the 1840s, England entered a period of peace and plenty that lasted from 1850 to about 1870. Anthony Trollope's fiction mirrors the Establishment of that period--comfortably off, even wealthy; concerned with individual morality; and relatively unaware of how private virtues and vices interact with public issues.

Trollope was born on April 24, 1815. His mother, Frances Trollope (1780-1863), was the author of The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and many novels. He was a large, awkward, shy boy who developed into a burly, vigorous, even boisterous man. He went to school at Winchester and Harrow, but he was a very poor student. When he was 19 years old, he went...