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biographies are R. H. Super’s
The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope
(Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1988) and Richard Mullen’s
Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in his World
(London, 1990). Michael Sadleir’s
Trollope: A Commentary
(London, 1927) remains interesting not only for its biographical material but also because Sadleir’s work stands on the threshold between Trollope’s age and our own; just before Trollope’s son Harry died in 1926, Sadleir was able to meet and correspond with him over his biography. N. John Hall has edited
The Letters of Anthony Trollope
(2 vols., Stanford, 1983), and this is now the standard scholarly edition of the correspondence.
    Two works which are very helpful in gaining an understanding of the contemporary critical reception of Trollope’s writings are
Trollope: The Critical Heritage
(London, 1969), edited by Donald Smalley (a collection of the critical responses gleaned from the major periodicalsof the day), and David Skilton’s analysis of these and other contemporary responses, and of Victorian perceptions of fiction more generally in his very helpful
Trollope and his Contemporaries : A Study in the Theory and Conventions of Mid-Victorian Fiction
(London, 1972). Jane Nardin’s
Trollope and Victorian Moral Philosophy
(Athens, Ohio, 1996) places Trollope’s work in the context of Victorian intellectual history. The most recent bibliography of later criticism can be found in
The Reputation of Trollope: An Annotated Bibliography 1925–1975
(New York, 1978) by John Charles Olmsted.
    For a very readable account of contemporary views and memories of Trollope himself, see the collection
Trollope: Interviews and Recollections
(London, 1987), edited by R. C. Terry.
    Two books by J. Hillis Miller, one early and the other more recent, provide important insights into some of the more theoretical aspects of Trollope’s writing, such as his texts’ relationship with the reader, with their world and with an abstract sense of ‘the law’; these are
The Form of Victorian Fiction
(Notre Dame and London, 1968), and
The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin
(New York, 1987).
    N. John Hall’s
Trollope and his Illustrators
(London, 1980) provides an excellent account (with many illustrations) of this important aspect of the Victorian book, and is especially pertinent to
The Last Chronicle
, as Trollope was sorely disappointed when Millais could not provide the illustrations for this novel.
    Mary Hamer’s
Writing By Numbers: Trollope’s Serial Fiction
(Cambridge, 1987) addresses itself to the effects of serial publication on Trollope’s novels, and she reproduces and gives an account of Trollope’s working diary for
The Last Chronicle of Barset in The Times Literary Supplement
, 24 December 1971, p. 1606. Many more general critical works on Trollope or on Victorian fiction include discussions of
The Last Chronicle of Barset
, and some of the best of these are: Ruth ap Roberts,
Trollope: Artist and Moralist
(London, 1971); Robin Gilmour,
The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel
(London, 1981); John Halperin,
Trollope and Politics: A Study of the Pallisers and Others
(London, 1977); James R. Kincaid,
The Novels of Anthony Trollope
(Oxford, 1977);Arthur Pollard,
Anthony Trollope
(London, 1978); Stephen Wall,
Trollope and Character
(London, 1988); and Andrew Wright,
Anthony Trollope: Dream and Art
(London, 1983). Three useful collections of essays on Trollope are
The Barsetshire Novels
(London, 1983), edited by Tony Bareham,
Trollope: Centenary Essays
(London, 1982), edited by John Halperin, and
The Penguin Companion to Trollope
compiled by Richard Mullen with James Munson (London, 1996).
    NOTE ON THE TEXT
    The Last Chronicle of Barset
was published in thirty-two weekly parts between 1 December 1866 and 6 July 1867. As Trollope relates in
An Autobiography
, the sixpenny weekly serialization