I have been led to say these few words, not at all
from a desire to supplement my father’s biography
of himself, but to mention the main incidents in his
life after he had finished his own record. In
what I have here said I do not think I have exceeded
his instructions.
Henry M. Trollope.
September, 1883.
MY EDUCATION
1815-1834
In writing these pages, which, for the want of a better
name, I shall be fain to call the autobiography of
so insignificant a person as myself, it will not be
so much my intention to speak of the little details
of my private life, as of what I, and perhaps others
round me, have done in literature; of my failures
and successes such as they have been, and their causes;
and of the opening which a literary career offers
to men and women for the earning of their bread.
And yet the garrulity of old age, and the aptitude
of a man’s mind to recur to the passages of
his own life, will, I know, tempt me to say something
of myself;—nor, without doing so, should
I know how to throw my matter into any recognised
and intelligible form. That I, or any man, should
tell everything of himself, I hold to be impossible.
Who could endure to own the doing of a mean thing?
Who is there that has done none? But this I protest:—that
nothing that I say shall be untrue. I will set
down naught in malice; nor will I give to myself,
or others, honour which I do not believe to have been
fairly won. My boyhood was, I think, as unhappy
as that of a young gentleman could well be, my misfortunes
arising from a mixture of poverty and gentle standing
on the part of my father, and from an utter want on
my part of the juvenile manhood which enables some
boys to hold up their heads even among the distresses
which such a position is sure to produce.
I was born in 1815, in Keppel Street, Russell Square;
and while a baby, was carried down to Harrow, where
my father had built a house on a large farm which,
in an evil hour he took on a long lease from Lord
Northwick. That farm was the grave of all my father’s
hopes, ambition, and prosperity, the cause of my mother’s
sufferings, and of those of her children, and perhaps
the director of her destiny and of ours. My father
had been a Wykamist and a fellow of New College, and
Winchester was the destination of my brothers and
myself; but as he had friends among the masters at
Harrow, and as the school offered an education almost
gratuitous to children living in the parish, he, with
a certain aptitude to do things differently from others,
which accompanied him throughout his life, determined
to use that august seminary as “t’other
school” for Winchester, and sent three of us
there, one after the other, at the age of seven.
My father at this time was a Chancery barrister practising
