Of the great Victorian novelists, Anthony Trollope (1815-82) was the most prolific, and he was justly regarded as the foremost presenter of the lives of the professional and landed classes whose members provided the core of his readership. Many of his novels first appeared in parts or as serials in magazines, giving his fiction the currency which nowadays we can compare only to serial drama on television. One obituarist went so far as to write that his work 'will picture the society of our day with a fidelity with which society has never been pictured before in the history of the world'. Born in London in 1815, the fourth surviving child of a failing barrister with a difficult personality and grandiose expectations, the novelist spent a miserable childhood and youth. Because of his poverty he felt himself an outcast at Harrow and Winchester, where he was a scholastic failure. He felt further rejected when his mother abandoned him for four years at the age of twelve to go to America in a vain attempt to save the family's fortunes, leaving Anthony with his father, who was by now in a mental state verging on insanity. After his father's inevitable bankruptcy, Frances Trollope turned author in her early fifties, achieving fame and prosperity with Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and a flow of successful novels through the 1830s and 1840s. Through a family contact, Anthony was found a clerkship in the Post Office, and after a period in London he was posted to Ireland, where he became a reliable and energetic public servant. In 1844 he married Rose Heseltine, about whom we know little, except that she was an expert household manager, and her husband relied on her literary judgement throughout his life.