Waltham House, Trollope's home from 1859 to 1871. Demolished about 1936.
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”.
Anthony Trollope
For most of his life Trollope was a keen horseman, and another of the advantages of Waltham House was that it was within reach of the Roothing country between Ongar and Dunmow where he loved to hunt. About this passion he writes thus: When I first came to Waltham Cross in the winter of 1859-60, I had almost made up my mind that my hunting was over. I could not then count upon an income which would enable me to carry on an amusement which I should doubtless find much more expensive in England than in Ireland. I brought with me out of Ireland one mare, but she was too light for me to ride in the hunting-field. As, however, the money came in, I very quickly fell back into my old habits. First one horse was bought, then another, and then a third, till it became established as a fixed rule that I should not have less than four horses in the stables. Sometimes when my boys have been at home I have had as many as six. Essex was the chief scene of my sport, and gradually I became known there almost as well as though I had been an Essex squire, to the manner born. Few have investigated more closely than I have done the depth and breadth and water-holding capacities of an Essex ditch. It will, I think, be accorded to me by Essex men generally that I have ridden hard. The cause of my delight in the amusement I have never been able to analyse to my own satisfaction. In the first place, even now, I know very little about hunting, -though I know very much of the accessories of the field. I am too blind to see hounds turning and cannot therefore tell whether the fox has gone this way or that. Indeed all the notice I take of hounds is not to ride over them. My eyes are so constituted that I can never see the nature of a fence. I either follow someone, or ride at it with the full conviction that I may be going into a horse-pond or a gravel-pit. I have jumped into both the one and the other. I am very heavy, and have never ridden expensive horses. I am also now old for such work, being so stiff that I cannot get on to my horse without the aid of a block or bank. But I still ride after the same fashion, with a boy’s energy, determined to get ahead if it may possibly be done, hating the roads, despising young men who ride them, and with a feeling that life can not with all her riches have given me anything better than when I have gone through a long run to the finish, keeping a place, not of glory, but of credit, among my juniors.
But life at Waltham Cross consisted of a good deal more than social activity. ”They were to me years of great prosperity”, he says, and such prosperity was obviously the fruit of sustained hard work. Trollope gives us an interesting insight into his method of work.
The work I did during the twelve years that I remained there, from 1859 to 1871, was certainly very great. I feel confident that in amount no other writer contributed so much during that time to English literature. Over and above my novels, I wrote political articles, critical, social, and sporting articles, for periodicals, without number. I did the work of a surveyor of the General Post Office, and so did it as to give the authorities of the department no slightest pretext for fault-finding. I hunted always at least twice a week. I was frequent in the whist-room at the Garrick. I lived much in society in London and was made happy by the presence of many of my friends at Waltham Cross. In addition to this we always spent six weeks at least out of England. Few men I think ever- lived a fuller life. And I attribute the power of doing this entirely to the virtue of early hours. It was my practice to be at my table every morning at 5.30.a.m; and it was also my practice to allow myself no mercy.
An old groom whose business it was to call me, and to whom I paid £5 a year extra for the duty, allowed himself no mercy. During all those years at Waltham Cross he never once was late with the coffee it was his duty to bring me. I do not know that I ought not to feel that i owe more to him than to any one else for the success I have had. By beginning at that hour I could complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast.
Anthony Trollope’s departure from Waltham Cross and the reasons for it are described later in the autobiography. It was a move made with some sentiments of regret at leaving the scene of such success and happiness, but Trollope’s practical good sense won the day.
In the spring of 1871 we, – I and my wife, – had decided that we would go to Australia to visit our shepherd son. Before starting there came upon us the terrible necessity of coming to some resolution about our house at Waltham. It bad first been hired, and then bought, primarily because it suited my Post Office avocations. To this reason had been added other attractions, – in the shape of hunting, gardening, and suburban hospitalities.
Altogether the house had been a success, and the scene of much happiness. But there arose questions of expense. Would not a house in London be cheaper? There could be no doubt that my income would decrease, and was decreasing. I had thrown the Post Office, as it were, away, and the writing of novels could not go on forever. Some of my friends already told me that at fifty-five I ought to give up the fabrication of love-stories.
The hunting, I thought must soon go, and would not therefore allow that to keep me in the country. And then, why should I live at Waltham Cross now, seeing that I had fixed on that place in reference to the Post Office? It was therefore determined that we should flit, and as we were to be away for eighteen months, we determined to sell our furniture.
So there was a packing up, with many tears, and consultations as to what should be saved out of the things we loved.
As must take place on such an occasion, there was some heart-felt grief. But the thing was done, and orders were given for the letting or sale of the house. I may as well say here that it was never let, and that it remained unoccupied for two years before it was sold. I lost by the transaction about £800. As I continuously hear that other men make money by buying and selling houses, I presume I am not well adapted for transactions of that sort. I have never made money by selling anything except a manuscript. In matters of horse – flesh I am so inefficient that I have generally given away horses that I have not wanted.
So ended an intensely busy and productive period in Trollope’s life. Although he speaks of Waltham House as being a place where he could entertain friends from London, he does not detail their visits. During this period he was on terms of more or less close friendship with Thackeray, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Wilkie Collins, George Augustus Sala, George Eliot, and John Everett Millais, who illustrated five of his novels. It is quite likely that many of these literary and artistic friends visited Waltham House.
Waltham House was later owned by the renowned rose grower, William Paul, of the Royal Nurseries, Waltham Cross. By the 1930s it had become a convent school and was demolished in about 1936 when Abbey Road was constructed across its grounds. Grove Cottage (the ”Small House at Allington”), which belonged to Bishops’ College, was pulled down in the early 1960s when the site was sold and redeveloped with the characterless block of maisonettes that stands there now: there is little left to remind us that a great writer once lived in this district.
