It's not fair to compare Trollope with Dickens - but who can resist it?

It's not every day you find yourself agreeing with übergrump Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph. There are few things he has much time for, including the front figures of his own party, and the negative attitude - even when you suspect he has a point, sometimes especially then - can be tiresome. I was completely on his side the other day, though, when he wrote an article on the time-honoured theme of Trollope vs Dickens, and concluded that though Trollope's novels can be amusing, he can't hold a candle to the inimitable.

You might well think "does it need saying"? Actually it does. There are a lot of smitten Trollopians out there who are convinced that their hero was the greatest writer of the 19th century, and that he compares favourably to just about everyone, but especially to Dickens. That's why I'm thrilled every time a Dickens fan hits back. To be fair, though, Dickens and Trollope have very little in common, and there's no real reason to compare them.

I have read two Trollope novels, "The Way We Live Now" and "Can You Forgive Her?". Now, that's not a very high percentage of the author's work, I agree, but as they are both supposed to be among his best work ("Can You Forgive Her?" is one of the famed Palliser novels), and as I have also sat through the very - er - thorough TV adaptation "Barchester Towers" and the more pacy Andrew Davies adaptation of "He Knew He Was Right", I think I have enough to go on to see a pattern of sorts. Trollope's genre seems to be the comedy of manners, where the author casts a more or less indulgent eye on his characters and chuckles "What fools these mortals be". Dickens, on the other hand, writes epic drama (except perhaps in the case of "The Pickwick Papers"). He digs deeper and is more dramatic and colourful because the genre requires it. To compare Trollope and Dickens novels is a bit like comparing the films "When Harry Met Sally" and "Chariots Of Fire". Trollope is less of a poor man's Dickens than a poor man's Thackeray - if the latter's "Vanity Fair" is anything to go by.

Also, Dickens is one of the giants of English literature. You wouldn't dismiss a modern author because he/she was not as good as Dickens. It's hard on Trollope that he should be dismissed for that reason, only because he happens to have been roughly contemporary with the great man. It's like criticising an Elizabethan playwright for not being as good as Shakespeare. It is possible to be very, very good and still not be able to compare with the author of "Great Expectations", "David Copperfield" and "Bleak House".

Having said all that, Trollope has himself and his fans to blame. Trollope satirised Dickens as "Mr Popular Sentiment", but didn't find it beneath him to imitate a typically Dickensian way of villain-naming, thus very unwisely inviting comparisons. (Obadiah Slope - Old Testament first name and one-syllable, unglamorous family name - geddit?) And I'm still not quite convinced that I think Trollope is particularly good, quite apart from how he compares to Dickens and the other towering writers of the 19th century (though I'm willing to give him a few more tries). His characters are so frightfully ordinary in their preoccupations and ditherings. Maybe this is why so many people like him - you would be more likely to run into a typical Trollopian character in real life than a typical Dickensian one. More's the pity.