Anthony Trollope, born in 1815, the year of Waterloo, was one of an extraordinary generation of English novelists, a generation perhaps unequalled in variety, scope, and talent in British literary history. It was a generation that came to maturity in the first decades of Queen Victoria's reign and its work continues to shape how successors have come to view ‘Victorian’ literature. It included Elizabeth Gaskell, born 1810; William Makepeace Thackeray, born 1811; Charles Dickens, born 1812; Charlotte Bronté, born 1816; Emily Bronté, born 1818, George Eliot, born 1819 and Anne Bronté, born 1820. It was a generation which grew up under the benign shadow of the works of Sir Walter Scott and under the heady influence of Romanticism (both British and European). Had not the term ‘Victorian’ established itself long ago, it was a generation which might well be known in literary-historical terms as ‘post-Romantic’.

Trollope was well aware of the literary tradition in which he found himself and of the work of those contemporaries against whom he measured himself and his art. He also had ambitions as a literary critic and a literary historian. Early on in his career he had contemplated writing a vast ‘History of World Literature’ (though the ‘World’ defined here would probably have been a singularly Eurocentric one). In the 1860s he resumed an aspect of this unwieldy project by preparing notes for a ‘History of English Prose Fiction’, a history which would have begun with Sidney's Arcadia and ended with Scott's Ivanhoe. Had the project been realized it would doubtless have been highly, and to some modern eyes, intrusively opinionated (he had, for example, found Aphra Behn's novels ‘detestable trash’), but it would also have attempted, daringly enough, ‘to describe how it had come to pass that the English novels of the present day have become what they are, to point out the effects which they have produced, and to enquire whether their great popularity has on the whole done good or evil to the people who read them’ (A. 139). Here, as throughout his comments on fiction, Trollope tends to look on literary criticism as part moral exercise and part a ‘vindication’ of his own professional status as a ‘realist’ writer.