In the opening chapters of Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now, Lady Carbury, who, it is important to note, is not known as an exemplar of literary taste, sends the following letter to a periodical editor:

Dear Mr Alf,

Do tell me who wrote the review on Fitzgerald Barker's last poem. Only I know you won't. I remember nothing done so well. I should think the poor wretch will hardly hold his head up again before the autumn. But it was fully deserved. I have no patience with the pretensions of would-be poets who contrive by toadying and underground influences to get their volumes placed on every drawing-room table. I know no one to whom the world has been so good-natured in this way as to Fitzgerald Barker, but I have heard of no one who has extended the good nature to the length of reading his poetry.

I share it here because I am convinced that this is his commentary on the critical controversy surrounding Philip James Bailey’s Festus, which lasted from roughly 1840-1874 as new editions were printed that required comment.

Here are a few reasons.

Bailey was known as “Festus Bailey” for most of his life, since the work was first offered anonymously, so Trollope is likely signaling a coincidence with the F-B of “Fitzgerald Barker.”
With the rest of the Spasmodics, Bailey was routinely attacked by anonymous critics, such as wrote for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Review. Authors often raged to find out what critic had made such sometimes slanderous claims, but had no way of finding out.
The specificity of the the phrase “on every drawing room table,” I think is unique to criticism of Festus. In any case, I’ve never encountered it elsewhere. The reviewer who used it IRL means it as a compliment: that Bailey’s work was so popular, people read it who didn’t usually read poetry; it was everywhere, but in this exchange Carbury is using its ubiquity as a negative.
Finally, since Festus is an epic, there were probably a great many people who bought the book and didn’t quite finish it. There were even cribbed versions floating around that gave the most important extracts of Festus so that non-readers could still roam confidently with the cultured class, so this is probably a comment on that.

I don’t know where it will go from here. I just picked up the book in a charity shop in Oxford for something to read, but already I’m feeling the bite of Trollope’s satire against figures either he or Carbury fails to appreciate.