Arrested Development: Characterisation, the Newspaper and Anthony Trollope

Abstract

Anthony Trollope famously envisioned novel writing as a way to participate in British politics, yet his novels are curiously empty of writers--other than his rascally journalists. This chapter argues that Trollope’s novels caricature journalists and newspapers and, in doing so, flatten out the British news system. In drawing a stylistic and literal contrast between the novel and the newspaper, Trollope develops a novelistic poetics more generous than the stark absolutes and fake news of his fictionalised newspapers. His reductive treatment of journalism stands in blatant opposition to the care with which he fictionalises the world of British parliament and cultivates rounded liberal characters, such as Phineas Finn and Plantagenet Palliser. Not only does his method in representing journalists mimic the strategies of the newspaper editors themselves, it also conveys the distortion Trollope perceives in their representative methods and their construction of a national reading public. Trollope’s emphasis on fictional narrative becomes an important counterweight to the series of disconnected and decontextualised outrages published by his fictional journalists. In drawing this distinction, Trollope invites his readers to think analytically about the way that they relate to and absorb the news. Trollope’s novels imitate and rework journalistic writing practices to theorise the ethical and political effects of formal choices on public discourse. Trollope, in a sense, is an early media theorist thinking through the contrasting systems of reality offered by newspapers and novels.