Though a clever and well-educated man and a Fellow of New College, Oxford, Thomas Trollope failed at the Bar due to his bad temper.

Ventures into farming proved unprofitable, and his expectations of inheritance were dashed when an elderly, childless uncle[a] remarried and fathered children.

Anthony Trollope suffered much misery in his boyhood, owing to the disparity between the privileged background of his parents and their comparatively meagre means.

Born in London, Anthony attended Harrow School as a day pupil for three years, beginning at age seven, without paying fees because his father's farm,[b] acquired for that purpose, lay in the neighbourhood.

With no money or friends at these two high-ranked elite public schools, Trollope was bullied a great deal, enduring miserable experiences.

A debt of £12 to a tailor fell into the hands of a moneylender and grew to more than £200; the lender regularly visited Trollope at his workplace to demand payments.

Although he had arrived with a bad reference from London, his new supervisor resolved to judge him on his merits, and within a year, by Trollope's account, he earned a reputation as a valuable public servant.

[14] Trollope began writing on the numerous long train trips around Ireland he had to take to carry out his postal duties.

His postal work delayed the beginning of writing for a year;[31] the novel was published in 1855, in an edition of 1,000 copies, with Trollope receiving half of the profits: £9 8s.

[30] He immediately began work on Barchester Towers, the second Barsetshire novel;[32] upon its publication in 1857,[33] he received an advance payment of £100 (about £12,000 in 2024 consumer pounds) against his share of the profits.

In 1859, he sought and obtained a position in the Post Office as Surveyor to the Eastern District, comprising Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, and most of Hertfordshire.

[35] In late 1859, Trollope learned of preparations for the release of the Cornhill Magazine, to be published by George Murray Smith and edited by William Makepeace Thackeray.

Thackeray and Smith both responded: the former urging Trollope to contribute, the latter offering £1,000 for a novel, provided that a substantial part of it could be available to the printer within six weeks.

[34][37][38]: 207–08 Framley Parsonage proved enormously popular, establishing Trollope's reputation with the novel-reading public and amply justifying the high price that Smith had paid for it.

[38]: 209 [40] By the mid-1860s, Trollope had reached a fairly senior position within the Post Office hierarchy, despite ongoing differences with Rowland Hill, who was at that time Chief Secretary to the Postmaster General.

[41] When Hill left the Post Office in 1864, Trollope's brother-in-law, John Tilley, who was then Under-Secretary to the Postmaster General, was appointed to the vacant position.

In the autumn of 1867, Trollope resigned his position at the Post Office, having by that time saved enough to generate an income equal to the pension he would lose by leaving before the age of 60.

[44] A petition was filed,[47][48] and a Royal Commission investigated the circumstances of the election; its findings of extensive and widespread corruption drew nationwide attention, and led to the disfranchisement of the borough in 1870.

Among American literary men he developed a wide acquaintance, which included Lowell, Holmes, Emerson, Agassiz, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Bret Harte, Artemus Ward, Joaquin Miller, Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, James T. Fields, Charles Norton, John Lothrop Motley, and Richard Henry Dana Jr."[49] Trollope wrote a travel book focusing on his experiences in the US during the American Civil War titled North America (1862).

During his time in America, Trollope remained a steadfast supporter of the Union, being a committed abolitionist who was opposed to the system of slavery as it existed in the South.

[53] In Australia, he spent a year and two days "descending mines, mixing with shearers and rouseabouts, riding his horse into the loneliness of the bush, touring lunatic asylums, and exploring coast and plain by steamer and stagecoach".

On the positive side, it found a comparative absence of class consciousness and praised aspects of Perth, Melbourne, Hobart and Sydney.

[56] In the late 1870s, Trollope furthered his travel writing career by visiting southern Africa, including the Cape Colony and the Boer Republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.

In the completed work, which Trollope simply titled South Africa (1877), he described the mining town of Kimberly as being "one of the most interesting places on the face of the earth.

Trollope's popularity and critical success diminished in his later years, but he continued to write prolifically, and some of his later novels have acquired a good reputation.

[64] Julian Hawthorne, an American writer, critic and friend of Trollope, while praising him as a man, calling him "a credit to England and to human nature, and ... [deserving] to be numbered among the darlings of mankind", also said that "he has done great harm to English fictitious literature by his novels".

[67] The young James wrote some scathing reviews of Trollope's novels (The Belton Estate, for instance, he called "a stupid book, without a single thought or idea in it ... a sort of mental pabulum").

[69] Other contemporaries of Trollope praised his understanding of the quotidian world of institutions, official life, and daily business; he is one of the few novelists who find the office a creative environment.

[78] In 2011, the University of Kansas's Department of English, in collaboration with the Hall Center for the Humanities and in partnership with The Fortnightly Review, began awarding an annual Trollope Prize.

Notable fans have included Alec Guinness, who never travelled without a Trollope novel; the former British prime ministers Harold Macmillan[79] and Sir John Major; the first Canadian prime minister, John A. Macdonald; the economist John Kenneth Galbraith; the merchant banker Siegmund Warburg, who said that "reading Anthony Trollope surpassed a university education";[80] the English judge Lord Denning; the American novelists Sue Grafton, Dominick Dunne, and Timothy Hallinan; the poet Edward Fitzgerald;[81] the artist Edward Gorey, who kept a complete set of his books; the American author Robert Caro;[82] the playwright David Mamet;[83] the soap opera writer Harding Lemay; the screenwriter and novelist Julian Fellowes; liberal political philosopher Anthony de Jasay and theologian Stanley Hauerwas.