the Tramp Society

There is evidence that Anthony went to the races once, in a boisterous mixed party; a letter has survived from him to 'My dear Miss Dancers': 'Like a man of honour I send you what I owe -- that horrid white and pink which ought never to have won the race!! If the gloves do not fit pray let me know -- & I will procure another pair.' He asked her to thank 'Ellen' for all her kindness; he had 'her flowers blooming on my desk the envy of all the Clerks in the Office -- tell her also that I have still the pin which she wanted, but was not able to purloin.' Yet another young lady, Emma, was, he hoped, 'consoled for the loss of the gingerbread man -- tell her that she should never allow grief for anyone to prey upon her spirits for long. It is very bad for the complexion.' And finally, 'I think Mr G.T. must have been hid in that cupboard yesterday evening -- else Emma would not have been so very angry with me . . .'
   There was also the Tramp Society, which consisted of Anthony, his friend John Merivale (now a law student) and Walter Awdry, who was a Winchester friend of both Anthony's and Tom's. Awdry had been in trouble both at school and at Oxford; Anthony, who loved him, described him as perverse, 'bashful to very fear of a lady's dress' (not like Anthony), 'unable to restrain himself in anything, but with a conscience that was always stinging him' (like Anthony); a loving friend, though very quarrelsome; and perhaps, of all men I have known, the most humorous.'
   The three friends went wandering on foot in the country around London. 'Southampton was the furthest point we ever reached; but Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire were more dear to us.' These were his happiest times, he said. They slept rough, and terrorised villages by the 'loudness of our mirth'; they got into scrapes, played practical jokes on farmers, and pretended to be escaped lunatics. But the fun, wrote Anthony, was the fun of Awdry, 'and would cease to be fun as told by me.'

Some gleams of light in the life of young Anthony Trollope, now (in the late 1830s) a copying clerk at the general Post Office near St. Paul's, and as thoroughly undistinguished in his first job as he had formerly been as a scholar at Harrow and Winchester. This is an extract from Victoria Glendinning's wonderful biography Trollope (1992), pp. 83-84.

Anthony's banter about grief and the complexion was relevant to everyone's experience. Each year pulmonary TB alone accounted for 3,000 deaths per million -- about three times higher than Covid-19 in 2020, as things look currently. And TB was a young adult's disease. Anthony had recently lost two siblings that way, Henry and Emily. They were grieved for, as Anthony's unlovable father was not, but life had to continue. Through all those deaths, and through the financial disorder that her husband bequeathed her, Anthony's remarkable mother blazed on with her late-flowering career as a popular author, evincing a similar stoicism to Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, and all the countless unremembered ordinary people who had no choice but to slog through their grief during that era of high mortality. She sustained herself with strong green tea and laudanum.

Anthony's parents' first address was Keppel Street in Bloomsbury. While working as a post office clerk, Anthony's lodgings were near Marylebone. Anthony had grown up in Harrow, Middlesex (location selected by his father to take advantage of free admission to the school for local boys). Later, Frances Trollope found a home at Hadley, just beyond Barnet. Trollope's psychogeography, in short, is oriented around the north-west of what's now Greater London, as confirmed here by his references to Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. It was the opposite quadrant from Dickens', whose London perspective was south-eastern: Kent, the great river, and Essex beyond it. Trollopian London is more genteel (all those clerical connections) and less instinctual, more modern and more open: a place linked by easy transport connections to the other places he knew, like the west country (Barsetshire to be...), and later Ireland.

VG notes that Anthony's hilarious pal Walter Awdry "became a school usher, then a clergyman, and died young and in poverty". (What a never-to-be-written biography must lurk in that sentence.)