SOURCE: “Anthony Trollope and the Visual Language of the Nineteenth-Century Theatre,” Etudes Anglaises, Vol. 46, No. 3, July-September, 1993, pp. 289-300.

In the following essay, Maunder explores the way in which Trollope appropriates techniques used by nineteenth-century theater actors in creating the characters in his fiction.

The novel and the drama, were, contended Wilkie Collins in his “Preface” to Basil (1852) the “twin sisters in the family of fiction.” Yet while comments on the presence of theatrical elements in the works of Hardy, Balzac, Reade, James and particularly Dickens, have become a critical commonplace (critics generally agree that they all consciously applied some of the current theatrical techniques to their own novels), Trollope is rarely mentioned in discussions of the relationship between the two genres beyond the fact of his passion for Jacobean and Restoration drama. “Mr Trollope,” wrote The Times (23rd May 1859), “carries his aversion from anything melodramatic to an extreme...