BOOK REVIEW : A Quietly Sexy Teller of Tales : TROLLOPE: A Biography <i> By N. John Hall</i> ; Clarendon Press/Oxford $30; 581 pages.

As an unhappy schoolboy--outsized, awkward, untidy as an ambulating ink-smudge--Anthony Trollope would daydream. His were moderate daydreams, and coherent.

“For weeks, for months if I remember rightly, from year to year,” he wrote of his air castles, “I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions and proprieties and unities. Nothing impossible was ever introduced. I myself was of course my own hero. Such is the necessity of castle building. But I never became a king or a duke. . . . A learned man nor even a philosopher. But I was a very clever person and beautiful young women used to be fond of me.”

The recollection, as N. John Hall notes in “Trollope, A Biography,” suggests the seed of Trollope’s novels, whether in the six-part Barchester cycle, with its country clergymen and squires; or the Palliser cycle, also in six parts, with its London political world.

The continuity is there, as the characters revolve through one book to the next. So is the evocation of life, not at its extremes but at its apparent middles. So is the fortifying irony.

Watch those middles, though. The social setting may be stable, but there is nothing intimately moderate in the saintly the Rev. Mr. Harding, the tormented Rev. Josiah Crawley and the termagant Mrs. Proudie of the Barchester novels, or in the seemingly frivolous, seemingly calculating Lady Glencora and the old Duke of Omnium in the Palliser series.

The daydreaming is the key; and although Hall’s biography has its thin spots, he gets the important things right; especially this one.

The man Trollope: A noisy, boisterous, fox-hunting, Establishment type; an apparent Squire Western out of “Tom Jones.” The writer: Creator of a fictional space as broad and mysterious, superficially as sunny and potentially as rending, as the sea in good weather.

He somewhat deceived his contemporaries, who read him voraciously and made him almost rich. “I wish that Trollope would go on writing ‘Framley Parsonage’ forever,” wrote Mrs. Gaskell, a literary light of her time. Critics tended to think that in his 47 novels, he did just that. They were patronizing; he was too much fun, too well-liked. His books had “no aesthetic purpose; they mean nothing more than they say,” the Times of London complained. Readers “need no educated taste but only a healthy appetite.”

Then there were the prodigious, apparently unshadowed output and the working methods. Pocket-watch in front of him, he tried to write four pages an hour and 10 or 12 a day.

When his daily output fell, he would scrawl “ill,” “hunting,” or sometimes “alas” and “ah me,” in his daily writing record. Writing was like shoe-making, he argued. To the Victorians, diligent makers of shoes, this was disturbing. Art should belong to a different world, they thought. They wanted sublimity; they wanted passion, though not sex. They wanted Dickens.

Trollope, much calmer--and quietly sexier--could not be first-rate art. The attitude persists today. Dickens, as Katha Politt recently pointed out in Harpers, is included in the much-debated literary “canon.” Trollope is not. She prefers Trollope; so, in fact, do I.

Dickens, of course, did what Trollope did not: He created outsize, supremely idiosyncratic characters. Trollope did what Dickens did not: He created the space between characters, the web of relationships that joined them. Dickens was theatrical; and so, in a way, was Trollope.

Dickens’ theater was that of the actor who launches the emotion; Trollope’s, that of the actor who receives it.

He was the grandson of two parsons. His maternal grandfather spent most of his energies inventing things: A carriage that wouldn’t turn over, a dish that muffled the irritating sound of knives scraping on china. He was liberal and humane as well. He encouraged Frances, his daughter, to study; and after a spell of marital life, she became a world traveler and successful novelist.

Anthony’s father was a barrister whose declining fortunes kept the family struggling and whose increasingly harsh temper made Anthony’s youth a misery.

He escaped by joining the Postal Service and going to Ireland as a traveling supervisor. It paid him well and gave scope to his organizing energies and his liking for telling people what to do.

Back in London, he rose high in the service--among other things, he introduced the mailbox into England--and he put off retirement until long after he had become a famous writer.

“I had imbued myself with a thorough love of letters--I mean the letters that are carried by the postman--and was anxious for their welfare as though they were all my own,” he wrote.

Clearly, Trollope’s enthusiasm for getting the mails to work was fundamental to his literary talent for showing how other things--clerical and parliamentary politics, the law, families and everything to do with money--do, in fact, work.

Hall details his postal career, his disciplined entry into writing, his early success and his relationships with publishers and other writers.

He is judicious in the space he gives to each of the novels--though with such a staggering output, even this limited detail can bog us down--and, without intruding himself, he manages to persuade us of his view that Trollope is one of the great writers, and one whose genius was essentially comic.

The author uses Trollope’s published work and that of his mother and others who knew him. He uses his published autobiography, his letters and whatever of the apparently limited archival material is available.

Trollope scrupulously avoided any detailed self-revelation, except when writing of his miserable childhood. Accordingly, there is next to nothing about his wife, Rose, and not much about his relationship with his two sons.

He seems to have been a generous father and a devoted husband, though he had a platonic affection for Kate Field, a young American feminist, lecturer and early publicity agent for the Bell Telephone system.

Hall extracts a suggestive portrait nevertheless, though I wish he had let himself go a little more in speculating about those areas, such as Trollope’s marriage, that he could not document.

Next: Christopher Goodrich reviews “Goodness” by Tim Parks (Grove Weidenfeld) .