Abstract
Literary fame, like love, is fickle. Could Anthony Trollope return for one evening to his favorite chair in the Garrick Club, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins and other literary friends might well expect to hear a roaring discourse on the effect that art trends, continental divisions, and general world conditions can have on a writer’s popularity. For Anthony Trollope’s literary reputation shows, perhaps more clearly than that of any other writer, the vicissitudes to which this type of fame is subject. |He was, to be sure, very much admired in his own day, though not so much as Dickens or Thackeray. But even before his death his popularity was on the wane, and it was eclipsed totally by the posthumous publication of his Autobiography, in 1882.