Drawing Dispossession

Dispossession (2015) is a 96-page colour graphic adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s 1879 novel John Caldigate. It is the primary outcome of a 2012 commission from the University of Leuven to develop, draw and rationalise a new graphic novel relative to Trollope’s (Fig. 1). Dispossession will be published in an English edition and as Courir deux lièvres [To Run Two Hares] in a French edition in conjunction with a 2015 academic conference on the occasion of the bicentenary of Trollope’s birth.1 The commission encompassed theorisations of adaptation, the habits and limitations of research and practice, narrative drawing and Victorianism. An academic partner volume, Transforming Anthony Trollope: ‘Dispossession’, Victorianism and 19th-Century Word and Image (2015), published at the same time, will include new writing on the graphic adaptation of nineteenth-century literature, Victorian illustration and Victorianism.