Of all Victorian authors, Trollope comes closest to aspiring to the “degree zero” style that has played such an important role in modern theorizations of prose. Committed to an ideal of stylistic transparency, Trollope sought the unmediated transmission of authorial thought-content, borrowing from the more psychological strains of belletrism. However, Chapter 5 challenges the moralization of Trollope’s “disappearing” style as honest or forthright by cataloguing the acts of formal deception necessary to render such effects. Moreover, Trollope’s writings on style reveal his interest in non-mimetic features of prose such as harmony and rhythm, challenging “ease” and “lucidity” as preeminent realist virtues. The chapter concludes that Trollope’s blend of Attic simplicity with Ciceronian schemes proves his style to be one of the most artfully mannered in Victorian English, creating an impression of aesthetic virtuosity where many critics have seen only functional pedestrianism.

This chapter further develops the case for the novel's usefulness as a fictional reality by examining two claims of Anthony Trollope's Autobiography: that this novel-writing developed out of a paracosmic play practice he called ‘castle-building’, and that he made up his novel plots as he wrote them. Through an analysis of his and the De Quinceys’ games, I point out how the improvisational nature of play – the virtual world is ‘filled in’ and revised over time with little premeditation – as an obvious analogue to Trollope’s construction of the fictional Barsetshire, and to his plotting of individual novels. I argue that the characters of The Small House at Allington behave improvisationally, inventing, revising, and ‘filling in’ their personhoods as they go along, offering an alternative reading of the moral logic and psychology in Trollope’s realism. For Trollope, the novel is distinctive for providing this experience of fictional living, not as ‘mere’ escapism but as it contributes concretely to the reader’s experience of their own world.