Trollope by Victoria Glendinning Victoria Glendinning’s comprehensive account of the life of Anthony Trollope manages to be both humane and scholarly. His was a life of such stress, such achievement, such tragedy and strain, physically, mentally and emotionally, that it is hard to believe he even survived his 67 years. His energy and prolific output in the face of impossible odds mirrored that of his mother, Fanny Trollope, who climbed the social ladder through sheer determination and hard work; and his insecurities and suffering – including rejections in both his official Post Office work and often in his writing – was the story of his hopeless, unpopular barrister father. Glendinning illustrates Trollope’s emotional life and illuminates many interesting aspects not covered by his letters or other archives by finding relevant passages in his fiction, always so fitting that her reader cannot question their contribution to our understanding of the man. Trollope lived in at l...
The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Mystery by Douglas Woodruff The case of the Tichborne claimant was a sprawling legal and media story in the second half of the nineteenth century which tied up the courts, worried the establishment and provided an endless source of gossip, argument and outrage for the whole of Britain for several decades – and even, see Zadie Smith’s novel The Fraud (2023), to this day. At its heart was the loss, supposedly at sea off South America in 1854, of the young heir to the Tichborne estate and baronetcy in the south of England. His mother, hoping he was still alive, advertised far and wide for news of her son, offering a reward. A man came forward from a village in Australia called Wagga Wagga, claiming to be the lost Roger Tichborne. From the start, what should have been simple was complicated: the Claimant bore a certain likeness to the lost son but while the son had been slim, this man was huge. And despite having had a good private education, this Roger...