“Among English novels of the present day, and among English novelists, a great division is made,” Trollope famously argued in An Autobiography:

Trollope drafted An Autobiography in 1875–76, when the critical consensus in favor of “higher realism” had been established for some time. His chapter on “English novelists of the present day” stresses the social and moral responsibility of the novelist, setting the leisurely unfolding of events over striking effects, and pitting “the elucidation of character” over “the construction and gradual development of a plot.” “When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know and I do not very much care how it is to end,” Trollope observes. “Wilkie Collins . . . plans everything on, down to the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end . . . The construction is most minute and most wonderful. But I can never lose the taste of the construction” (A ch. 13).

There may be an element of truth in Trollope’s contrast between himself and Collins: between his own dense, multiple plots dominated by an overarching authorial persona and the latter’s use of multiple voices and contrasting forms of narrative testimony. But his use of such contrasts is primarily rhetorical and, throughout his writing career, Trollope increasingly draws on “sensational” techniques. As Walter M. Kendrick has argued, “opposites are always economically interrelated” in Trollope’s fiction, which works “in shifting, dynamic relation to the cliche´s of his contemporaries.”