‘Lost volume’ of Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children reinstated for new edition

Decade-long project to restore 65,000 words of Trollope’s original manuscript results in ‘quite extraordinary’ version of the novel

A crime against literature is due to be reversed, with a new edition of Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children set to reinstate 65,000 words cut from the novel on its publication in 1880.

Researchers led by professor Steven Amarnick have worked for a decade on the original manuscript of Trollope’s sixth and final Palliser novel, which is held in Yale University’s Beinecke library. After painstakingly picking out the author’s scrawl from among a forest of crossings-out, they have discovered that Trollope’s excisions from the text amount to almost a quarter of the original, removing a whole volume from what was envisaged as a four-volume novel.

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