Clerks, Clerics and Tricksters: A Word and its Literary History

This weekend the Erewash Press published Anthony Trollope’s novel The Three Clerks.  It’s a great read, partly because of the way the book draws on Trollope’s own life as a clerk in the Victorian era, showing where some of the tropes of his more famous works originated.  I thought some of the introduction I wrote for our edition would be of interest to Quite Irregular readers – in it I trace the changing implications of the word “clerks”, and what readers in different eras might have understo...