I’ve just finished rereading Trollope’s Palliser novels. By reading, this time round I mean listening to. Since the six thick tomes run something under two million words and consume nearly a hundred hours of listening time, this milestone merits marking. A hundred hours represent a not insignificant portion of my fast-dwindling supply. How fast who knows, but the investment, as prospectuses say, is “meaningful”.

Since I undertake nothing these days to fill time, only to fulfill it, I find myself wondering what sustenance I derive from this more than a dollop of Trollope. The world abounds with books I’d like to read or reread: why these now? And why this deep warm satisfaction at the recollection? I no longer read either to know or show, only for nutrition. What is it about Trollope that nourishes this reader at this hour?

If you know Trollope only from TV series based on his titles, his allure isn’t easy to explain. All televised Victorians look alike. Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Trollope, there’s not much difference. We take lazy comfort in their clipped accents, hooped skirts, resplendent dining tables (with obsequious, white-tied servants standing stiffly at attention) and brushed gleaming stovepipe hats. Bobbing in these costume dramas as in warm bubble-baths, we’ve forgotten them in a day. Potato chips for the mind, they’re delectable but not memorable.

Trollope I do not forget. True, all his plots bear a resemblance – aspiring untitled indigent handsome young men love peerless yet penniless aristocrats they can’t afford to marry, so settle their attentions on lustrous incomes, and the complications that ensue from this pursuit – but who reads novels for their plots? I read to meet the makers originating this transmission, to hear their voices, share their sorrows, bask in their glow. I’m eager to spend a hundred hours in Trollope’s company; I may take up his Barsetshire six-pack next I’m so charmed. Why?

Trollope is neither a passionate reformer, like Dickens, nor soul inspector, like Thoreau or Jesus, nor crackling raconteur, like his revered forbear, Jane Austen. I envision him a clubman, in a creased leather armchair, beside a flickering fire, sipping his madeira after an ample and convivial dinner. He is glad to see us. He chortles, harrumphs, winks, pokes fun, but always with the cozy confidence of a comfortable Briton at the apex of an empire that would never wane. Few folks behave badly in Trollope’s world and these are scoundrels, who’ll get what’s coming to them and never pose a plausible threat to the established order. None of Trollope’s characters concern themselves with an afterlife because they already live in heaven, plus or minus.

Smug, even stuffy, one might call Trollope’s milieu – self-approving – narrow-minded – far from thrilling. Yet their chronicler loves his actors. He does not caricature, which would be easy – Gilbert and Sullivan did it brilliantly. He feels his characters’ humanity – and presents it with empathy, sympathy, affection, forgiveness. Deep they may not be, but they are real – like us – and their lives, however circumscribed, are complex.

The atmosphere of a Trollope fiction is viscous, almost smoky, with affection, and with an unshakeable assurance that folks are decent, deep down, good chaps, and all will turn out all right in the end. Whereas Dickens jars, jazzes, dazzles, rages with a wild vivacity, Trollope murmurs, understates, unfailingly cordial and kind.

Trollope’s complacency heartens after the confused, noisy nastiness of modernity. What relief to dwell awhile in a world neither brutal nor mean! I smile listening to Trollope, cradled by his voice. It feels good to smile.