Anthony Trollope: Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

CHAPTER I - MY EDUCATION - 1815-1834 (continued)

I wish I could give some adequate picture of the gloom of that farmhouse. My elder brother--Tom as I must call him in my narrative, though the world, I think, knows him best as Adolphus--was at Oxford. My father and I lived together, he having no means of living except what came from the farm. My memory tells me that he was always in debt to his landlord and to the tradesmen he employed. Of self-indulgence no one could accuse him. Our table was poorer, I think, than that of the bailiff who still hung on to our shattered fortunes. The furniture was mean and scanty. There was a large rambling kitchen-garden, but no gardener; and many times verbal incentives were made to me,--generally, I fear, in vain,--to get me to lend a hand at digging and planting. Into the hayfields on holidays I was often compelled to go,--not, I fear, with much profit. My father's health was very bad. During the last ten years of his life, he spent nearly the half of his time in bed, suffering agony from sick headaches. But he was never idle unless when suffering. He had at this time commenced a work,--an Encyclopedia Ecclesiastica, as he called it,--on which he laboured to the moment of his death. It was his ambition to describe all ecclesiastical terms, including the denominations of every fraternity of monks and every convent of nuns, with all their orders and subdivisions. Under crushing disadvantages, with few or no books of reference, with immediate access to no library, he worked at his most ungrateful task with unflagging industry. When he died, three numbers out of eight had been published by subscription; and are now, I fear, unknown, and buried in the midst of that huge pile of futile literature, the building up of which has broken so many hearts.