The Three Clerks

Among Trollope's novels, The Three Clerks is unusual for being published in two versions. As Paul Delany tells us in his introduction to the novel, Trollope chose to make substantial cuts to the three-volume first edition to reduce production costs for a cheap edition. He marked about 13,700 words for deletion-about six percent of the text. The shortened Three Clerks is a significant record of Trollope's self-criticism, which is why this edition restores his cuts in italics. He had to decide which parts of his text were disposable and which essential; or even just which parts he liked more than others. In his Autobiography he boasted that few writers had written more words than him; the present edition shows his performance at the opposite task, of writing fewer.