03 Oct 2021
On This Day
3 October 2021 Cheryl

3 October 1867: Anthony Trollope resigns from his day job to write full-time

Anthony Trollope worked for the Post Office

History credits Anthony Trollope with introducing the postal pillar box to Britain in 1855, giving people the freedom of private correspondence. Initially rectangular, sage green and with a large ball on top, it was not until 1874 that they were painted the familiar red. [1]

Anthony Trollope joined the British General Post Office to work as a junior clerk when he was 19 years old in 1834. The position was suitable for a gentleman, but not well paid and he was a careless and unpunctual employee. In 1841, at the age of 26, he moved to Ireland to take up a position as a postal surveyor’s clerk and within a year he had gained the reputation of a valuable public servant. His salary and travel allowance went much further in Ireland than they had in London, and he found himself enjoying a measure of prosperity. He married there and began writing.

Throughout the 1850s Trollope’s postal career continued to flourish. After a two-year mission reorganising rural mail delivery that took him over much of Great Britain, Trollope described this time as “two of the happiest years of my life”.

He was also writing constantly with ten new books written or in progress before 1860, including his popular Barchester Chronicles series. Every morning he would rise at 5.30 and write for three hours before going to his Post Office job. He wrote 250 words every 15 minutes, pacing himself with a watch, and paid his servant an extra £5 a year to wake him up early with a cup of coffee.

Although happy and comfortable in Ireland, Trollope felt that, as an author, he should live within easy reach of London and moved there in 1859. By the mid-1860s, he had reached a senior position within the Post Office hierarchy and had travelled across the world on Post Office business. He was, by now, also earning a sizable income from his writing.

In 1867, after 33 years service and missing out on a promotion, Trollope resigned from the postal service forfeiting the pension he would have been entitled to if he had completed eight more years of service.

After a short-lived political campaign, Trollope concentrated entirely on his literary career for the rest of his life, producing a total of 47 novels, 42 short stories, 5 travel books, and 2 nonfiction books by the time of his death in 1882.