On Trollopian Realism

This paper intends to distinguish Trollopian realism in the Victorian age through contextual analysis of characterization.Anthony Trollope, Dickens's contemporary and rival in the gilded time of English fiction, is defined as a social problem novelist (a subcategory of the realistic novelist) in the first section of the thesis, after a summary of the ups and downs of Trollopian criticism. To articulate how he achieves realism through characterization, four groups of typical characters he created in his major novels are selected to represent different morals in the real-time English society in the second part, i.e., gentlemen clergymen in his ecclesiastic series, swindlers and speculators in The Way We Live Now, political personages in The Prime Minister, and unconventional women characters. The final chapter attempts to clarify value changes during the industrialization era reflected in Trollope's fiction and seeks to sum up techniques and features of Trollopian realism in the conclusion.