PASSAGES FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A BIBLIOMANIAC
The introduction to XIX Century Fiction, A Bibliographical Record. London, Constable. 1951. © Richard Sadleir, reproduced with kind permission

I had been brought up in a household devoted to Jane Austen and Dickens, and with a limited but genuine fondness for Anthony Trollope. Largely, I daresay, in reaction from the fevers, furies and languors of the French aesthetes, and as my interest in moderns began to wane, I became possessed by childish memories of the Barsetshire novels, and half-frivolously began to experiment in collecting Trollope. In a very short time I was completely absorbed in this new and fascinating task. At that time I suppose about 1918 Trollope presented an ideal problem to the bookcollector who really loved the job of collecting. He had written a very large number of books; he was little sought after and therefore (with one or two exceptions) moderately priced; and he was desperately difficult to find in tolerable original condition. I spent four enchanted years making my first collection of Anthony Trollope, which (on orthodox group lines) was extended to include the numerous works of his mother Frances, with, in support, the solitary production of his sister Cecilia, and a selection of the novels of his brother Thomas Adolphus, and of his sister-in-law Frances Eleanor. These four years left a permanent mark on my bibliomania. They taught me to love the Victorian novel as a material thing, and therefore for their very multiplicity of volumes if for no other reason to be susceptible to old novels generally.

Collecting Trollope was combined with collecting various other novelists of his period. These had to be chosen from among the, at that time, un-sought-for and therefore cheaply priced. My own inclination (based on memories of books read, or read to me, in youth) turned toward Marryat, Disraeli, Mrs Gaskell and Wilkie Collins. To the intelligence and kindly enthusiasm of Everard Meynell at his Serendipity Shop in Shepherd's Market, I owed a realisation of Herman Melville and many of his 'firsts'. Charles Reade and Whyte-Melville just happened, the former becoming in time a respect-worthy bore, the latter being quickly recognised as an error of judgment. But the hunt was a delight and the examination of my captures an education. In 1922 there appeared a volume of critical essays and first edition bibliographies entitled Excursions in Victorian Bibliography. The essays were very unequal and the bibliographies elementary; but the book had its interest as a piece of pioneer research. The authors dealt with were those just enumerated, plus of course Anthony Trollope.

After the publication of Excursions, I settled to the writing of a biography of Anthony Trollope and his mother. This was the first full-length application of a principle which had from the beginning influenced my book-collecting policy and was to become an integral part of it. I have never undertaken the intensive collection of any author or movement without the intention of ultimately writing the material collected into biography, bibliography or fiction. Admittedly in early days that intention produced only trifling results (for a portfolio of unprinted analyses of the Symbolist movement, an elaborate chart of the Rougon-Macquart novels and a decent essay on the poetry of Verhaeren are more or less their sum), but it existed; and with the ambition to follow up a volume of sketchy bibliographies of seven Victorian novelists with a solid critical biography of one of them, it definitely imposed itself. The book, Trollope: a Commentary, was published in 1927, and a year later appeared a full-length Bibliography of his works.

My Trollope material had now been transferred from the collecting department of my mind to that concerned with literary production. Naturally I remained on the look-out for additional or better-condition titles by him or by any of the chosen Victorian authors; but there was a vacancy for a new collecting interest and that vacancy was quickly filled.