ADD and the heyday of the novel

"He noticed everything," Henry James said of Anthony Trollope, either a backhanded compliment or a praising with faint damnation by one writer, who himself noticed everything, of another.

Trollope wrote big books, which often ended with "Endnotes." "The novels of Anthony Trollope precisely suit my taste,--solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale," wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne of his contemporary. There's no evidence that the two writers ever met, but Trollope did write a piece, "The Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne," published in the North American Review, September, 1879, citing the differences between them as writers. Trollope makes the case that Hawthorne's "The House of Seven Gables" is inferior to "The Scarlet Letter", saying this: "In composing (The House of Seven Gables) he was driven to search for a plot, and to make a story. "The Scarlet Letter" was written because he had it to write, and the other because he had to write it..."

It's almost overwhelming to think about how much information a writer of Victorian literature had to keep in his (or her) mind as they were writing, without word processors or dictation machinery or any other technological device aimed at aiding composition. To be rapaciously attentive was absolutely necessary then, as it is not now. What's probable is that novelists of that time must certainly have had ADD, the good side of that condition that allows one's attention to hold many things at once.

What's also interesting is the title Trollope chose for his masterpiece: "The Way We Live Now," a title any minimalist would envy.