Anthony Trollope

Trollope's boyhood was one of genteel poverty and humiliation: a day-boy at Harrow among boarders whose families could pay, while his own family's finances collapsed around him. He joined the Post Office as a young clerk and stayed for over three decades, rising to a senior surveying role that took him across Britain and Ireland; on his travels he is credited with introducing the pillar box for mail into Britain.

He wrote before his workday began, with a watch on the desk, holding himself to a fixed word count every morning regardless of whether a novel was finished or not, a method that produced forty-seven novels, including the interlinked Barsetshire and Palliser sequences. His posthumously published Autobiography (1883), which laid this mechanical process out in frank detail, scandalized critics who preferred to imagine genius as inspiration rather than discipline.

He died in London in 1882.