An Irishman's Diary

Just when we thought it was finally safe, Ireland is to be on the receiving end of yet another wave of foreign invaders later…

Just when we thought it was finally safe, Ireland is to be on the receiving end of yet another wave of foreign invaders later this month, writes Frank McNally

The expeditionary force will land in Dublin on August 27th, from where it plans to sweep across the country in a wide circle, via Carrick-on-Shannon, Connemara, and Banagher, before advancing into rebel Cork. Its members sound like something from Gulliver's Travels. And yet they insist there is no cause for alarm. The Trollopians, as they call themselves, come in peace.

The invasion is not without colonial aims, however. The 46 tourists - all members of the transatlantic Trollope Society - will be here primarily to visit sites associated with their hero, Anthony Trollope. But the group also hopes to revive Irish interest in Trollopianism and to seek new recruits for the cause. In that sense, they will be trying to reclaim a country that once, and for almost 20 years, the English writer made his own.

While many Irish authors have had to go to London to achieve fame, Anthony Trollope's uniqueness is that he performed the trick in reverse. Not that his literary career took off when he first arrived here as a 26-year-old post office worker: if anything, the early Irish themes retarded his success at home. But Ireland made him - personally, professionally, and artistically - to an extent he was still marvelling at near the end of his life, by which time he was wealthy, famous and back in England.

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In his autobiography, after describing the misery of his first quarter-century, he writes: "From the day on which I set my foot in Ireland, all these evils went away from me. Since that time, who has had a happier life than mine? Looking around upon all those I know, I cannot put my hand on one." He was not taking anything for granted, however. In a distinctly Irish touch, he goes on to express his fear that the good times cannot last indefinitely, and hopes he dies before his luck changes.

Well might he have reflected on the vagaries of fortune. Trollope came to Ireland in 1841 and left in 1859. The calamity that befell the country in between was the subject of some of his early writings: it could hardly be otherwise when his debut novel - The MacDermots of Ballycloran - appeared in 1847. But somehow, the overall picture in his autobiography is still a rosy one. "It was altogether a very jolly life that I led in Ireland," he recalled. "The Irish people did not murder me, nor did they even break my head. I soon found them to be good-humoured, clever - the working classes very much more intelligent than those of England - economical and hospitable."

It was his professional life as a post-office surveyor that brought him into contact with the people, and it was on his many long train journeys around Ireland that he found the time to describe them. But he took his official role just as seriously as his writing. Trollope sought to expand the Irish postal service to anywhere it could be made pay, often letting optimism get the better of him. He admitted that some of his rural network collapsed later because he had overestimated the use of short-cuts across fields. There was a rule that postmen should not walk more than 16 miles a day, he wrote, "and as I measured on horseback the short-cuts which they would have to make on foot, perhaps I was sometimes a little unjust".

By the end of his career, it was not just his post office work that was suffering revisionism. The sheer extent of his literary output - there were 47 novels by then, some the size of bricks - had been frowned on by Victorian critics who believed that all worthwhile writing was a rare collaboration between author and muse, and should not be attempted in the absence of either. When Trollope revealed that he wrote to a strict schedule - he had a man employed to wake him up daily at 5am - he confirmed everyone's worst suspicions.

He added to them by admitting that he wrote for profit. W.H. Auden later commented: "Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him, even Balzac is a romantic." For these and other reasons, he had fallen out of fashion by the time of his death, and stayed there for much of the 20th century until the Trollope Society was founded in 1988, with the intention of publishing a uniform edition of his work.

There were soon two such editions and the rehabilitation continued through the 1990s with a rash of biographies and belated commemoration in Westminster Abbey. Political leaders developed a particular fondness for his work. Under John Major, it was quite the vogue for Conservative politicians to go to bed with a Trollope.

Until now, Ireland has been relatively immune, but the organisers of the Irish tour - the society's first visit here - hope to change that. Anyone wishing to meet the group or exchange ideas can get the relevant details at www.trollopesociety.org

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