Marking Trollope’s Birthday at St George’s Bloomsbury

Each year, the Trollope Society pauses on 24th April to celebrate the birthday of Anthony Trollope, one of the most prolific and perceptive novelists of the Victorian period. In 2025, we mark the 210th anniversary of his birth, and this year’s celebration will take us back to where it all began: St George’s Church, Bloomsbury.

Built between 1716 and 1731, St George’s was the final and most ambitious of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s six London churches. It was here, in May 1815, that the infant Anthony Trollope was baptised – a connection that brings a special resonance to the Society’s event on Thursday 24 April. The evening will begin with a short tour of the church, including a visit to the font where Trollope was christened. Afterwards, we’ll enjoy wine and cake in the vestry, followed by a group seminar on the wider historical moment into which he was born.

The World in 1815

Trollope arrived in a year of remarkable upheaval and change. Most famously, 1815 was the year of the Battle of Waterloo – a turning point in European history that ended more than two decades of war with revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Britain’s victory secured its place as the dominant imperial power for the rest of the century. Trollope, who spent years working for the Post Office in Ireland and later travelled widely, was no stranger to the workings of empire and bureaucracy – themes that regularly surface in his novels.

At home, 1815 also saw the introduction of the Corn Laws, protectionist tariffs on imported grain which were intended to support British agriculture in the aftermath of war. The effect, however, was to drive up the cost of food and deepen the hardship faced by the urban poor. While Trollope did not write directly about the Corn Laws, he understood the political tensions and class divisions of nineteenth-century Britain with great clarity. His political novels – from Phineas Finn to The Way We Live Now – explore with subtlety the impact of self-interest, patronage, and reform on the business of government.

In literature, 1815 saw the publication of Emma, one of Jane Austen’s most celebrated novels. Trollope greatly admired Austen and spoke of her with respect, particularly for the precision of her character studies. It is easy to see her influence in the domestic realism and moral insight that characterise Trollope’s own work. Both authors shared a talent for observing the social dynamics of their time with wit and restraint.

Trollope’s Enduring Legacy

Anthony Trollope’s output was prodigious. Between 1847 and his death in 1882, he published 47 novels, along with short stories, travel writing, and an autobiography. His work is often associated with stability, tradition, and the genteel world of cathedral towns and country estates. But his fiction is far more wide-ranging than that: he was a sharp observer of political life, financial speculation, gender inequality and the pressures of work and social ambition.

He was also remarkably consistent in his humanity. Trollope’s characters are rarely saints or villains; instead, they are recognisably flawed, motivated by pride, love, duty, vanity, or ambition – much like the readers who encounter them. This refusal to moralise, combined with a steady gaze and a deep understanding of human psychology, makes his work enduringly relevant. Readers return to Trollope not only for the plots, but for the company of his people and the world he builds around them.

In his autobiography, Trollope recounts that he wrote for three hours each morning before breakfast, producing 1,000 words an hour. The methodical nature of his routine – combined with his work for the Post Office, where he helped introduce the pillar box – has sometimes overshadowed the sophistication of his storytelling. But his best novels offer a masterclass in tone, pace, and narrative control.

An Evening at St George’s

The birthday event at St George’s Bloomsbury is an opportunity to connect Trollope’s life with the wider world he inhabited – and to reflect on the legacies of 1815 as they echoed through the decades that followed. The seminar will invite discussion of these themes in a relaxed, informal setting.

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