Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the installation of Anthony Trollope’s memorial stone in Poets’ Corner.

This year following a brief wreath-laying ceremony in Poets’ Corner, commemorating the death of Anthony Trollope on 6th December 1882, we are holding a dinner in the Attlee Room in the House of Lords to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the installation of Anthony Trollope’s memorial stone.

The Dean of Westminster Abbey officially received the memorial stone for Anthony Trollope into Poets’ Corner on 25th March 1993. The memorial stone was unveiled by Sir John Major, and the reading was given by Victoria Glendinning and Jack May. Joanna Trollope and William Rees-Mogg attended the ceremony along with members of the Trollope Society.

It has taken 110 years for Anthony Trollope to be given a memorial in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey; as the president of the Trollope Society, Lord Rees-Mogg, said in his address at the ceremony on 25 March, it is perhaps a greater honour to be recognised late rather than early because it shows how high a writer’s reputation stands after all that time. In Trollope’s case, this is spectacularly so: in popular as well as critical esteem he has been rising steadily over the past half-century. His books now sell in paperback and hardback and on tape, and from this month until the end of the century will be published by the Trollope Society, all 47 of them, in handsome editions.

Isabel Quigly, The Tablet, 3 April 1993.