You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The heart of this book is a long, nuanced study of Anthony Trollope, a Victorian novelist whose works, like Dickens's, were often read aloud at family hearths for an evening's entertainment. The son of a bullying, unbalanced father and a socially winning but inattentive mother, both of whom were writers, young Anthony seemed oafish and dunce-like at school. Withdrawn from Harrow when his barrister father declared bankruptcy, he found a niche in the British Postal service, where he worked for thirty-three years, in increasingly responsible positions, before retiring to focus solely on his writing. He helped to reform the postal service of England and Ireland, is credited with having invented the common letterbox, and is said to have written and published more words than any other English novelist. Thus uncommonly and admirably, he contributed to the communicability, ease, and closeness of his time. Such was hardly, however, his own experience growing up. Shengold, scrutinizing Trollope's posthumously published autobiography, his fiction, and other sources, demonstrates that the prodigious novelist—he published sixty-seven books in all—suffered unremitting abuse, misery, and deprivation in childhood. How he accomplished all that he did, at what cost, and through what psychological deployments engages Shengold, who sees Trollope as a survivor of soul murder.
For several decades now, Leonard Shengold (1988, 1989, 1999) has pondered soul murder and its effects, the cruel process by which love and joy are killed in a human soul. The descriptive term surfaced in von Feuerbach's study of the unfortunate foundling Kaspar Hauser Ibsen, and Freud's Dr. Schreber (1989, pp. 14-23). Shengold brings compassionate psychoanalytic discernment and capaciousness to it, taking note of signs of long developmental ordeals and recognizing the devastating dynamics wrought by too much childhood abuse and deprivation—experiences of seduction, brutality, and desolation too intense and sustained