Anthony Trollope

Born on April 24, 1815, in London, Anthony Trollope was the son of a failing barrister and Frances Trollope, who would support the household by writing travel books and novels of her own. His childhood was wretched. Sent as a charity pupil to Harrow and then Winchester, he was bullied, neglected, and so poor that he later remembered being shunned by nearly every boy he met. At nineteen he took a clerkship in the General Post Office, a job he held without distinction until a transfer to Ireland in 1841 changed his life. There he married Rose Heseltine, found purpose, and began to write. His first real success came with The Warden (1855), set in the cathedral town of Barchester, followed by Barchester Towers (1857), which introduced the formidable Mrs Proudie and the oily chaplain Mr Slope. The Barsetshire and Palliser series made him one of the most widely read novelists of his age. He wrote forty-seven novels, rising before dawn to produce a fixed quota of words by the clock, a discipline he described with cheerful candor in his posthumous Autobiography (1883). He also invented the British pillar box, the red roadside postbox still in use today. The Way We Live Now (1875), a savage panorama of financial fraud and social rot centered on the swindler Augustus Melmotte, is often called his finest work. His frank admission that he wrote for money, and to a schedule, damaged his reputation for decades among readers who preferred their geniuses tortured. He suffered a stroke in November 1882 and died in London on December 6 of that year, aged sixty-seven.

Every morning at half past five, a servant paid an extra five pounds a year woke Trollope with coffee. He sat at his desk with his watch propped in front of him and wrote two hundred and fifty words every quarter hour, three hours straight, finishing before breakfast and dressing for the Post Office.