Sundays, whatever his
duties, his amusements, or the place; measuring out every page,
counting the words, and exacting the given quantity hour by hour. He
wrote continuously 2500 words in each day, and at times more than
25,000 words in a week. He wrote whilst engaged in severe professional
drudgery, whilst hunting thrice a week, and in the whirl of London
society. He wrote in railway trains, on a sea voyage, and in a town
club room. Whether he was on a journey, or pressed with office
reports, or visiting friends, he wrote just the same. _Dr. Thorne_ was
written whilst he was very sea-sick in a gale at sea, or was
negotiating a treaty with Nubar Pasha; and the day after finishing _Dr.
Thorne_ he began _The Bertrams_. It is one of the most amazing, and
one of the most comical, records of literary activity we have. No one
can suppose that work of a very high class can be so produced at all.
Nor does Trollope pretend that it is of a high class. He says it is
honest work, the best he could do.

He takes a strange pleasure in recounting these feats of literary
productiveness. He poses as the champion of the age in quantity and
rapidity. This lightning novelist could produce a volume in two or
three weeks; and thus he could easily turn out three novels of three
volumes each in a year. He gives us an exact list of sixty works
produced in about thirty-five years, and a total of about 70,000 pounds
as the earnings of some twenty-four years. He insists that he never
neglected his Post-Office work, but was an invaluable and energetic
public servant; he insists that, much as he enjoyed his literary
profits, he was never misled by the desire of money; and he insists
that he could have done no better work if he had written much less, or
if he had given more time to each book. In all this he does not
convince us. He certainly showed transcendent force of will, of nerve,
and of endurance. "It's dogged as does it!" says Giles Hoggett to Mr.
Crawley, in _The Last Chronicle of Barset_; and if "dogged" could make
a great novelist, Anthony Trollope was pre-eminently "dogged." But a
great novelist needs other gifts. And to tell us that he would not
have done better work if his whole life had been given to his work, if
every book, every chapter of every book, were the fruit of ample
meditation and repeated revision, if he had never written with any
thought of profit, never written but what he could not contain hidden
within