![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A Self-Appointed Task
Apr. 18th, 2015 10:10 amTome in Eastbourne furnished me with the four Barchester novels I didn't already have- so I was happy enough. But I had hoped they might have some of the less well known titles on their shelves and they didn't.
Putting Barset and Palliser aside, Trollope turns out to be quite a rare author. Posterity has whittled his enormous output down to a core of fewer than fifteen texts. These are regularly reprinted and everything else falls by the wayside. This happens to a lot of "classic" authors. Sometimes understandably. You'd have to be very keen on impis and white goddesses and African curses to want to plough through the whole of Rider Haggard. King Solomons Mines and She are the essential texts- and everything else is just more of the same. But Trollope is a different matter. I haven't seen it suggested that the neglected texts are inferior carbon copies of the favoured ones. It's just that there are so many of them- and posterity is lazy.
So I'm setting myself the task of hunting down the "lost" Trollopes. I've done it for Chesterton (who was hideously prolific) and I'm concurrently doing it for Wells. I could use the internet, but I don't think I shall. It's so much more fun to poke about among the stacks.
Putting Barset and Palliser aside, Trollope turns out to be quite a rare author. Posterity has whittled his enormous output down to a core of fewer than fifteen texts. These are regularly reprinted and everything else falls by the wayside. This happens to a lot of "classic" authors. Sometimes understandably. You'd have to be very keen on impis and white goddesses and African curses to want to plough through the whole of Rider Haggard. King Solomons Mines and She are the essential texts- and everything else is just more of the same. But Trollope is a different matter. I haven't seen it suggested that the neglected texts are inferior carbon copies of the favoured ones. It's just that there are so many of them- and posterity is lazy.
So I'm setting myself the task of hunting down the "lost" Trollopes. I've done it for Chesterton (who was hideously prolific) and I'm concurrently doing it for Wells. I could use the internet, but I don't think I shall. It's so much more fun to poke about among the stacks.
