A reader tells me that he had always thought ‘one-horse town’ must have derived from a 1940s film script in which John Wayne pushes open the swing doors of a saloon, gets his whisky, then inquires, ‘Whadda they call this one-horse town?’ But my correspondent finds Trollopean connections for the phrase.
He does not say which biography he is drawing on, but he sets the scene in 1855, when Trollope had to appear before a parliamentary committee at the instigation of some Irish MPs. It is certainly the case that in 1854 Trollope had returned to Ireland, where he had made a new life in the 1840s. In the hot July of 1855, I am told, he answered 1,672 questions from the committee about Irish postal arrangements.
He is said to have explained that, according to the volume of mail to a town, it would receive a delivery by coach and four, or a smaller vehicle with two horses, or even one horse.
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