The Form of News, or Anthony Trollope’s Journalists

Abstract

Anthony Trollope famously envisioned novel writing as a way to participate in British politics, yet his political novels are curiously empty of writers – except for his exaggerated journalists. This paper argues that Trollope crafts caricatures out of his fictional journalists and newspapers and, in doing so, flattens out the British news system. His reductive treatment of journalism stands in blatant opposition to the care with which he represents the world of British parliament and rounded liberal characters, such as Phineas Finn and Plantagenent Palliser. Not only does his method mimic the strategies of the newspaper editors themselves, it also conveys the distortion Trollope perceives in their representative methods and their construction of the reading public. This paper is part of a large book project called, Re-Forming Nation and Newspaper in the Victorian Novel, which suggests that Victorian novels represented news and newspapers to make sense of the novel’s place in a changing media landscape. This book argues that fictional news functioned as a key structural device for the novel: newspapers were sites in which novels experimented with the social logic of particular forms. They allowed for novelists to work through the contradictions and difficulties of nineteenth-century novelistic form, functioning as a device that both propels and disrupts novelistic plot, character, and community. In Trollope’s The Warden, for instance, the newspaper represents the warden, Mr. Harding, as a flattened caricature representative of the church’s corruption. Not only does the newspaper disrupt Mr. Harding’s sense of his place in the world, it also alters the form of the novel.