Anthony Trollope was HEAVILY Influenced by William Thackery, and I Can't Blame Him.

Super, R.H. Trollope’s “Vanity Fair.” The Journal of Narrative Technique. 9:1 (Winter, 1979): 1-20.

            In this mini-essay, “Super!” delineates the strong influence of William M. Thackery on Anthony Trollope. Super marks concisely the historico-textual intersection of Thackery and Trollope at the 1847 publication of Thackery’s Vanity Fair and Trollope’s completing his first novel and beginning his next, The Warden, immediately after. From the writing of The Warden on, Super says, Trollope is indelibly marked with Thackery-envy, becoming from that point a “Thackeryan novelist.”

I am interested in the notion that Thackery is not merely a historical influence on Trollope, one safely separated from Trollope by a generation or two. Thackery and Trollope were practically contemporaries.

Also interesting: the influences of Thackery evident in Trollope, the continuities that run between the two authors, are by no means an august tradition. The ideas, motifs, and textual engagements Trollope makes with Thackery are registered as shared artistic defects by the (roughly current) critics. What did this awful influence look like? I made a list.

(1)    Trollope takes up Thackerey’s idea of Vanity Fair as a “A Novel without a Hero” in Claverings.

(2)   Trollope’s novels, like Thackerey’s, all take place in a shared fictional universe, so that characters from one novel can show up or be mentioned in another.

a.       Vanity Fair’s Colonel Dobbin shows up as a guest of Colonel Newcome in The Newcomes, for instance. 

b.       The Saturday Review hated on this extended-universe-shit, saying that it was a sure fire way to bore readers. “If the present fashion continues, and the heroes of one novel reappear so constantly in the next, readers will begin to hope that funerals, and not marriages, may in future be made the finale in which all romances terminate.” (13)

c.       The Saturday Review, of course, is wrong; the surprise recognition of a known character from an earlier novel unexpectedly appearing in a later novel produces an excitement of recognition in the reader that is particularly pleasurable. It rewards close reading. And this pleasure doubles on itself with a kind of uncanniness, when the reader realizes that the novel they have in their hands, which they thought was a something completely new and alien, is in effect connected to and at one with a previously known world that turned out to be bigger and more complex than they imagined. Finding and mapping these connections, re-familiarizing oneself with the bigger and more intricate dimensions of the fictional universe they only thought they knew is a higher level of textual pleasure I usually only associate with sci-fi and comic book genres.

(3)     Thackerey and Trollope both integrated real life locations and businesses in their novels, as well as some of the “too-ridiculous-to-be-made up” names of real life people and personalities. 

(4)   Thackery and Trollope both parody giants of literature.

a.       Vanity Fair ch. vi: Thackery satirizes contemporary novelists.

b.      The Warden: Trollope parodies Carlyle and Dickens as “Dr. Pessimist Anticant” and “Mr. Popular Sentiment.”

(5)   Extending the concept of the “integrated universe” from (2), Trollope would include names from Thackery works in his novels.

a.       Thackery uses a pseudonym of his friend Matthew James Higgins, “Jacob Omnium,” for a character in Vanity Fair ch. xxii, which Trollope, in turn, picks up for the name of a Duke (Duke of Omnium).

                                                                          i.      In this case, the real life integration is passed on from Thackery to Trollope via Trollope’s textual integration. WHOA!

This is all not to say that Trollope is a completely passive in his reception of Thackereyan influence. Super points out that, although Trollope originally based his Lady Eustace on Thackery’s Becky Sharpe, he later rejects their similarity, almost ex post facto, claiming that Eustace would have been designed as she was had he never read of Sharpe. In a Bloomian fashion, here, Trollope receives Thackeryean influence, creates with it, and then rejects it so as to claim his production, Lady Eustace, as more fully his own, thereby overcoming and dominating the source of his own artistic power. Interestingly, Super endorses and ratifies Trollope’s Bloomian revolt on Thackery, judging that although Trollope was considered by his contemporaries as a “slightly inferior version of Thackery” that, in fact, Trollope’s Eustace was a superior – “more human” – construction than Thackery’s Sharpe.