The Tireless Traveler - by Anthony Trollope (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Tireless Traveler: Twenty Letters to the Liverpool Mercury by Anthony Trollope offers readers a vivid and revealing account of Anthony Trollope's 1875 journey from Ceylon through Australia, Hawai'i, San Francisco, and overland to New York. Edited and introduced by Bradford Allen Booth, this volume publishes for the first time twenty long-lost letters that fill a major gap in Trollope's biography and illuminate his role as both novelist and indefatigable observer of British colonial life. Unlike his better-known travel books, these letters were written for the Liverpool Mercury and thus speak directly to a broad provincial audience eager for practical knowledge of colonial societies. Trollope reports not on art or landscape but on institutions, commerce, labor conditions, and the day-to-day realities of settlement. His concerns, he repeatedly emphasizes, are "political, social, and material," and he measures colonies by their capacity to sustain working families rather than by their picturesque allure.

Booth's introduction situates the letters within Trollope's broader career and highlights their value for multiple fields of study. For biographers, they clarify an eight-month period of his life previously shrouded in uncertainty. For social and economic historians, they provide thick description of late nineteenth-century Australia and Ceylon in transition, down to wages, prices, and civic institutions. For literary scholars, they showcase Trollope's pragmatic voice, skeptical of imperial expansion and missionary interference yet steeped in Victorian assumptions about class, comfort, and utility. Vivid episodes--including the attack at Santa Cruz that cost Commodore Goodenough his life--sit alongside candid missteps, such as Trollope's erroneous claims about Hawai'i's distance from California or his dismissive view of San Francisco. As such, the letters capture both the strengths and limits of Trollope's worldview, offering indispensable insights into Victorian travel writing, colonial history, and the global imagination of one of Britain's most industrious novelists.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1941.