Historicizing Trollope

Baudelaire declared that contemporary life is the appropriate subject for art. For him, this involved 'ennui' and 'spleen', to which Trollope's great zest and humor stand in opposition. But Trollope takes place firmly as a novelist of realism: he is the most up-to-date of all the Victorian novelists, the one who most conspicuously writes about contemporary life. The contemporaneousness of his novels makes them much more likely to engage us in moral or political questions than would settled history. Trollope engages the reader in questioning moral principles and customs, bringing 'all before the bar of personal psychological experience', which has been considered the stamp of modernism.