Trollope’s Chapters

The unit of the chapter – so fundamental to nineteenth‐century prose narrative, yet so thoroughly ignored in accounts of the form of novels – is fundamental to Anthony Trollope’s work. The chapter stems from the textual practices of antiquity and of medieval biblical transmission, ultimately finding a home in the novel form. Chapters are key to Trollope’s understanding of readerly experience, in that they both license and manage the occasional inattention of the reader, while tacitly permitting an interplay between reading and not‐reading; they are also key to his understanding of the temporality of personal experience, which is based on the bounded unit known as the “episode.”