Of all this company, none more frequently than Trollope obtained a seat near Mrs. Lewes’ armchair on the left of the fire-place. The two novelists never talked publicly about themselves, but among the guests there were some who noticed a kind of parallel in George Eliot’s and Anthony Trollope’s literary courses. The earliest successes of both with the general public won the favour also of their most famous fellow-authors. Thackeray pleasantly complained if, after the day’s work was done, he could not at once refresh himself with _The Three Clerks_. George Eliot’s _Scenes of Clerical Life_ had no sooner appeared in _Blackwood’s_ than Dickens conjured all those about him to read them, saying, “They are the best things I have seen since I began my course.” A little later, Miss Marian Evans, to recall for a moment the name which never, by the by, appeared on the title-page of any of her books, set the literary world speculating about the identity veiled by the George Eliot pseudonym. Dickens alone penetrated the mystery, after reading the description of Hetty Sorrel doing her back hair. Only a woman, and one of first-rate genius, could have written that, he said. Hence his oracular reply, through his daughter, to a letter asking his opinion on the subject: “Papa wishes me to say he feels sure _Adam Bede_ is either by Bradbury or Evans, and he doesn’t think it’s Bradbury.”[21]
George Eliot, like many other great writers, avoided, so far as possible, reading the periodical reviews of her books. Love of approbation was with her a phrenological organ strongly developed; as all writers cannot but do, she found sweetness in the appreciation of her work by other labourers in the same literary field as her own. During the later fifties she made more than one visit to Florence and its neighbourhood in quest of materials and local colour for _Romola_, published in 1863. On those occasions she saw much of Anthony Trollope’s elder brother, Thomas Adolphus, who had made the Tuscan capital his home, and who never left it save on a short and rare visit to England. Anthony Trollope’s familiarity with the place dated, as has been seen, from the visit paid by him to his mother during her residence there. Those early reminiscences naturally increased Anthony Trollope’s interest in _Romola_. “A delightful generous letter from Mr. Anthony Trollope about _Romola_” brightened and encouraged the authoress in one of those moods of passing depression that sometimes beset the most intellectual toilers. “The heartiest, most genuine, moral and generous of men.” Such, at an earlier state of their acquaintance, had been the impression given by the author of _The Small House at Allington_ to the hostess of The Priory at those Sunday afternoon receptions. In common with his fellow-guests Trollope felt to the full the austere charm of George Eliot’s grave urbanity, and of her conversation--brightened indeed by no flashes of humour, but occasionally seasoned with utterances of penetrating sagacity condensed into epigram. With this woman of genius Trollope became a personal favourite. More than that, the two novelists appreciably, to some extent, influenced each other. “I am not at all sure,” George Eliot told Mrs. Lynn Linton, “that, but for Anthony Trollope, I should ever have planned my studies on so extensive a scale for _Middlemarch_, or that I should, through all its episodes, have persevered with it to the close.”