From Tauranga City Library’s archives
A monthly blog about interesting items in our collections.Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) rivalled his contemporary Charles Dickens for popularity and success as a novelist in Victorian Great Britain. First published in 1847 he was prolific, particularly given that for many years he was also a senior official at the Post Office. Trollope and Dickens wrote novels that were sensitive to the social structures of their age, sometimes with very similar themes, such as the injustices of the British legal system. Trollope became another favourite of BBC television’s costume drama producers - readers of a certain age may remember The Pallisers, The Barchester Chronicles or The Way We Live Now.
Trollope travelled widely outside Britain, both with the Post Office and after he resigned in 1867. His second son emigrated to New South Wales to run sheep; Mr. and Mrs. Trollope travelled to visit him in 1872 and spent some time in New Zealand on their way home.
The photographs hopefully make obvious how well-used the book has been – it is barely holding together, despite being partly rebound, with the front and back boards’ corners worn to a round and tears in the “front matter” - endpapers and title page.
The library’s Sladden Collection has a copy of a London edition of the New Zealand chapters, separately published in 1874. It is in much better condition, only having one reader in its lifetime.
The text can be read in the University of Auckland's Early New Zealand Books online collection.
A 2022 article by Malcolm McKinnon in the New Zealand Journal of Public History, ‘Extended by iron ruthlessness’: Anthony Trollope, the Waikato war, and empire in the teaching of New Zealand history and international relations (Volume 8, Page 75) opens with an extract from one of Trollope’s observations about recent events in New Zealand.
“The acquisition of the Valley of the Waikato, which contains excellent land, was a great thing done. The natives by the treaty of Waitangi, had been declared to be owners of the land, – and the difficulty of buying land from them was great. There was trouble in getting it from them unfairly; – more trouble in getting it fairly. But acquisition by war settled all this” (Chapter LXIII, page 652).
Trollope’s blunt views on the outcome of fighting in the Colony during the 1860s were not shared by everyone in Britain and New Zealand – McKinnon reports others that were far more critical, then and later. Even Trollope’s views are shaded differently across the New Zealand chapters. The wear on the library’s copy suggests the interest its readers had in Trollope’s opinions during the town’s infancy. They may have been very influential on the way the members of a new and small settler community thought about their place in the world.
