For the permanent questions of the politics of existence, Trollope remains the man. Illustration by Mr. Bingo

This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the English novelist Anthony Trollope, and maybe the fourth decade of the Trollope boom that has put him back into the most-read ranks of the English novelists. The metrics of such things are shaky; still, one professor has discovered that as many books were published about Trollope in the five years between 1976 and 1981 as had appeared in the entire near-century since his death, in 1882. That scholarly industry goes on, and now includes books called “Reforming Trollope: Race, Gender, and Englishness in the Novels of Anthony Trollope” and “The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels”—stern studies in sex, race, and colonialism, with modern academics enforcing the orthodoxies of our time as Trollope’s Barsetshire clergymen enforced the orthodoxies of theirs, with as much spirit and approximately as much effect.

More important, all of Trollope’s books have been back in print. (There are forty-seven novels and many volumes of stories and reportage.) Amateur readers have taken up Trollope as a cause and a favorite in a way that they have taken up perhaps no other nineteenth-century English novelist except Jane Austen. George Eliot has passionate readers, but they tend to concentrate on her one great book, “Middlemarch,” without rushing toward “Romola.” The fun of Trollope lies in his endless multiplicity: people who like “Rachel Ray” turn to “The Three Clerks,” and fans of “The Three Clerks” ask their friends about “Orley Farm.” Yet, beyond saying that his writing feels like life, it’s hard to say just how he works his magic—and a little digging shows that a sense of Trollope as a slightly guilty pleasure has been around since people started reading him.

“Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to a friend, knowing that his correspondent would be startled by the disclosure, since Trollope was so far from Hawthorne’s own dark, allegorical style. “Just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were made a show of.” Yet Henry James, in a long obituary tribute, complained that Trollope’s work lacked irony, and, for all his mastery of daily life, was not realistic enough. Trollope’s light, intrusive narrative voice, James thought, “took a suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, make-believe.”

Words change meaning over time, and the quality of irony that we value today is omnipresent in Trollope—and that is the habit of turning objects and values upside down, of seeing big and little inverted. Trollope’s people are all doing things that are small: getting on committees, making sermons, writing to newspapers, finding misplaced checks. Even Prime Ministers end up obsessed with trivial actions and tiny disputes. (Trollope’s Prime Ministerial hero is obsessed with decimal coinage.) Yet these acts are hugely important to them, and become so to us. His mother, the travel writer and novelist Fanny Trollope, wrote volumes on “domestic manners,” but “domestic politics” was her son’s preoccupation. Novelists of manners, like Thackeray, die as their manners age; in Trollope, we see the social forces that make manners happen, and these—the permanent appetite for power and prestige—change much less. That’s why, despite the dated subjects, the books don’t date. If we want to understand why e-mail arguments are dangerous (“The word that is written is a thing capable of permanent life, and lives frequently to the confusion of its parent. A man should make his confessions always by word of mouth if it were possible”), or if we want to understand why professional politicians hate “principled” stands (not because they hate principles but because they believe that the cost of the principles is already priced into the politics), or if we want to know how scurrilous gossip can eat away at its subject without actually damaging his reputation—for all the permanent, practical questions of the politics of existence, Trollope remains the man.

Tonally, there are at least three distinct Trollopes: the Trollope of the Barsetshire (or Barchester) novels; the Trollope of the Palliser, or political, novels; and the Trollope of the odder, one-off books. The Trollope of the Barsetshire novels is a master of the mock epic. Nothing in the little world of Barchester’s clerics really counts for much; everything in it is high drama. The Trollope of the political novels is a master of the anti-epic: we’re in the big world of power—it’s Parliament toward the height of the Victorian empire—and everything ends up being about matters of personality, temperament, and chance. The Trollope of the independent novels is more hit or miss: some of them (“The Three Clerks”) are top of the line, others (the dystopian science-fiction novel “The Fixed Period”) are eccentricities. Part of the appeal of his books is their consistency of spirit. A handsome new edition of “The Duke’s Children,” the last novel in the Palliser series, has just been published by the Folio Society. Much matter that had been cut by Trollope for practical reasons has been restored, but the truth is that the editing does not actually change the contents significantly. Trollope is not a sentence-by-sentence writer, or even a scene-by-scene writer; really, he is a character-by-character writer. We finish his books with portraits of people, and a few sentences added or subtracted don’t alter our feelings about the book.

Trollope’s autobiography, which he left to be published posthumously, superintends all his other stories, and was one of the things that got him, or his reputation, in trouble. Although he narrates his own tale well, he seems to paint himself in coarse colors. He outlines his very Victorian pleasures (he loved foxhunting, though he doesn’t seem to have been terribly good at it), his very Victorian politics (he tried for office as a Liberal and failed, feeling like a fool while doing so), and his very Victorian work ethic: he wrote for money, and he wrote to schedule, putting pen to paper from half past five to half past eight every morning and paying a servant an extra fee to roust him up with a cup of coffee. He made a record of exactly how much each of his novels had earned, and efficiency and economy, taken together, got him a reputation as a philistine drudge.

Trollope was, in truth, merely being practical about the problems of writing: three hours a day is all that’s needed to write successfully. Writing is turning time into language, and all good writers have an elaborate, fetishistic relationship to their working hours. Writers talking about time are like painters talking about unprimed canvas and pigments. (Nor is there anything philistine about writers talking money. Inside the ballroom at the PEN banquet, it’s all freedom and dignity; outside, it’s all advances.)

More important is what Trollope’s autobiography reveals about the liberating moment of his career: Trollope became an artist only after being sent to Ireland as a mid-level civil servant in the British post office. After an unhappy and isolated childhood—his mother, Fanny, was off in America; his remote, depressive father, a failed barrister, was merely absent—he was generally regarded as a hopeless case. Even in the post office, at first, he was considered a loser. But then, in 1841, he was packed off to Ireland. He fell in love with a woman there and married her, and there was something about the high-spirited mischief of Irish life that appealed to his essentially warm and energetic nature, and he soon became an exemplary employee. He experienced the post office as a form not of indenture but of emancipation. He introduced the postal pillar—the now bright-red postbox that still decorates British streets—even if he didn’t invent the thing, as myth has it. The post office also made him cosmopolitan, sending him around the world—in 1858, to Egypt and Palestine, then to Malta, Gibraltar, and Spain. He went on business to the West Indies and Central America, coming home through the United States; he got sent back to the United States in 1868, after the Civil War.