SOURCE: “Anthony Trollope, the Irish Writer,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 38, No. 1, June, 1983, pp. 1-42.

In the following essay, Edwards offers a detailed survey of Trollope's Irish novels and studies the way in which these works influenced Trollope's later writings.

Anthony Trollope's connection with Ireland is unique among the British major creative writers of the nineteenth century. For all of the many differences of their responses to Ireland, Trollope has one quality lacking in the rest of them. Britain made them. Every one of them saw Ireland as outsiders. Trollope did not. His view of Ireland from first to last was that of a participant: Ireland made him. Even Michael Sadleir, who saw Trollope as romanticizing his debt to Ireland at the expense of his debt to England, accepted that, although no more than that:

Ireland produced the man; but it was left to England to inspire the novelist. … Ireland...