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Anthony Trollope at Waltham Cross
Created 21 June, 2008
That remarkably industrious Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope, lived at Waltham Cross for twelve years between 1859 and 1871, arriving soon after his return from Ireland where he had spent sixteen years working for the Post Office. His choice of Waltham Cross was influenced by his new appointment as Surveyor to the Eastern District, which covered Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and most of Hertfordshire. For some time he had developed his career as a writer while continuing to carry out his official duties to the full satisfaction of his superiors. He had already published nine works, including the better known ''The Warden'' (1855), "Barchester Towers'' (1857) and "Doctor Thorne'' (1858), and at the time of his move to Waltham Cross he was engaged upon '' Framley Parsonage'' which was published in 1861. During the twelve years of his stay he wrote a further twenty-six books, including two more Barsetshire novels ("The Small House at Allington'' and "The Last Chronicle of Barset") and several of the novels f rom which the television series ''The Pallisers'' was compiled in the 1970s, such as "Phineas Finn, the Irish Member", "The Eustace Diamonds" and ''Phineas Redux". By 1867 Trollope felt obliged to resign his Post Office appointment so that he could devote himself entirely to his craft.
There are but few local records of Trollope's stay in Waltham Cross. It is known that he paid rent for a pew in Holy Trinity Church, Waltham Cross having become a separate ecclesiastical parish in 1855, and there is a strong local tradition which first appeared in print within a few years of Trollope's death in 1882 that the model for "The Small House at Allington'' was Grove Cottage, an attractive house at the corner of Churchgate and College Road. Trollope's residence, Waltham House, stood on the east side of Waltham Cross High Street between Eleanor Cross Road and the present Abbey Road, its gardens and paddocks extending down to the railway.
Our main source of information about Trollope's life at Waltham Cross is his auto- biography, published in 1883, the year after his death. This gives delightful cameos of domesticity, literary industry and enthusiastic activity in the hunting field. He emerges as an ebullient personality, an astonishingly hard-working man with a delightful wit - often directed against himself.
"I settled myself '', he writes, ''at a residence about twelve miles from London, in Hertfordshire, but on the borders of both Essex and Middlesex, which was some- what too grandly called Waltham House". At firsts he leased the house, but after spending about £1,000 on adding rooms and making it "for our purposes very comfortable", eventually purchased the freehold. "It was, however'', he somewhat ruefully adds, "a rickety old place, requiring much repair, and occasionally not as weather tight as it should be". But about the grounds he waxes enthusiastic: "We had a domain there sufficient for three cows, and for the making of our own butter and hay. For strawberries, asparagus, green peas, out-of-door peaches, for roses especially and such every-day luxuries, no place was ever more excellent". He also mentions the keeping and killing of his own pigs. His closeness to the railway station enabled him "to make myself frequent both in Cornhill and Piccadilly, and to live, when the opportunity came, among men of my own pursuit". Shoreditch Station was then the terminus of the line, which, he admitted, "had its drawbacks".