Benedict Anderson has famously argued that modernity relies on a sense of simultaneity that is ‘transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar’ (B. Anderson 2006: 24). According to Anderson, this form of simultaneity found its embodiment in two Enlightenment inventions, the newspaper and the novel, which by virtue of their form and structures of address connect events that have no relation other than that they happen to take place at the same time. Trollope's late novels, however, feature characters whose undisclosed activities in the past interrupt the narrative present, and who undo the teleological, progressive movement that the narrative seemed to embark upon. Trollope's late style thus revolves around states of a ‘noncontemporaneous contemporaneity’ (Harootunian 2007: 475), that is, ‘a present that has not simply overcome the losses of the past but that remains marked and interrupted by them’ (Vermeulen 2009: 104). This chapter will show how Trollope creates this different kind of simultaneity by, among other things, allowing glimpses of certain characters’ unknown past through selective forms of focalisation or narration. Significantly, this past is often set in the colonies. In The Way We Live Now, John Caldigate, and An Old Man's Love the love lives of those in the motherland are thwarted by adventurers hailing from America, Australia, and South Africa, whose return interrupts the narrative present. As such, Trollope's views about colonialism are expressed in his use of a particular form of simultaneity.

It is illuminating to consider the moments of simultaneity between past and present in Trollope's late novels as instances of allegory. In his study of the German baroque Trauerspiel, Benjamin conceives of allegory as ‘a late manifestation’, its ‘most radical procedure’ being ‘to make events simultaneous’ (Benjamin 2009: 197, 194). This allegorical form of simultaneity does not refer to the coexistence of events taking place at a different location, but of events taking place at a different time. Allegory thus designates a precarious state in between different temporalities, as one of Benjamin's examples nicely illustrates: an emblem showing ‘a rose simultaneously half in bloom and half faded, and the sun rising and setting in the same landscape’ (2009: 194).