Biographies and autobiographies furnish many photographic glimpses of the struggles and experiences of early adolescent years.
Anthony Trollope's autobiography[33] is pitiful. He was poor and disliked by most of his masters and treated with ignominy by his fellow pupils. He describes himself as always in disgrace. At fifteen he walked three miles each way twice a day to and from school. As a sizar he seemed a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from the dunghill, sitting next the sons of big peers. All were against him, and he was allowed to join no games, and learned, he tells us, absolutely nothing but a little Greek and Latin. Once only, goaded to desperation, he rallied and whipped a bully. The boy was never able to overcome the isolation of his school position, and while he coveted popularity with an eagerness which was almost mean, and longed exceedingly to excel in cricket or with the racquet, was allowed to know nothing of them. He remembers at nineteen never to have had a lesson in writing, arithmetic, French, or German. He knew his masters by their ferules and they him. He believes that he has "been flogged oftener than any human being alive. It was just possible to obtain five scourgings in one day at Winchester, and I have often boasted that I have obtained them all." Prizes were distributed prodigally, but he never got one. For twelve years of tuition, he says, "I do not remember that I ever knew a lesson."
At this age he describes himself as "an idle, desolate, hanger on ... without an idea of a career or a profession or a trade," but he was tolerably happy because he could fancy himself in love with pretty girls and had been removed from the real misery of school, but had not a single aspiration regarding his future. Three of his household were dying of consumption, and his mother was day nurse, night nurse, and divided her time between pill-boxes and the ink-bottle, for when she was seventy-six she had written one hundred and forty volumes, the first of which was not written till she was fifty.
Gradually the boy became alive to the blighted ambition of his father's life and the strain his mother was enduring, nursing the dying household and writing novels to provide a decent roof for them to die under. Anthony got a position at the post-office without an examination. He knew no French nor science; was a bad speller and worse writer and could not have sustained an examination on any subject. Still he could not bear idleness, and was always going about with some castle in the air finely built in his mind, carrying on for weeks and years the same continuous story; binding himself down to certain laws, proprieties, and unities; always his own hero, excluding everything violently improbable. To this practise, which he calls dangerous and which began six or seven years before he went to the post-office, he ascribes his power to maintain an interest in a fictitious story and to live in a entirely outside imaginative life. During these seven years he acquired a character of irregularity and grew reckless.