Queer Places:
Grandon, Hadley Green Rd, Barnet EN5 5PZ, UK
Cimitero Acattolico, Piazzale Donatello, 38, 50132 Firenze, Italy
Frances Milton Trollope, also known as Fanny Trollope (10
March 1779 – 6 October 1863), was an English novelist and writer who
published as Mrs. Trollope or Mrs. Frances Trollope. Her
first book,
Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) has been the best known.
She also published social novels: one against slavery said to have
influenced
Harriet Beecher Stowe, the first
industrial novel, and two
anti-Catholic novels that used a Protestant position to examine
self-making. Some recent scholars note how
modernist critics exclude women writers such as Frances Trollope from
serious consideration.[1]
In 1839,
The New Monthly Magazine claimed, "No other author of the present
day has been at once so read, so much admired, and so much abused".[2]
Two of her sons,
Thomas Adolphus and
Anthony, became writers.
Her daughter-in-law
Frances Eleanor Trollope (née Ternan), second wife of Thomas Adolphus
Trollope, was also a novelist.
Born at
Stapleton, Bristol, Frances was the third daughter and middle child of
the Reverend William Milton and Mary, née Gresley. Frances's mother died
in childbirth when Frances was five years old.[4][5]
Her father was remarried to Sarah Partington of Clifton in 1800.[6]
She was baptised at St Michael's, Bristol, on 17 March 1779.[7][8]
As a child, Frances read a great amount of English, French and Italian
literature. She and her sister later moved to Bloomsbury, London, in 1803
to live with their brother, Henry Milton, who was employed in the War
Office.[9]
In London, she met Thomas Anthony Trollope, a barrister, and at the age
of 30, married him on 23 May 1809 in
Heckfield, Hampshire. They had four sons and three daughters:[10]
Thomas Adolphus, Henry, Arthur, Emily (who died in a day), Anthony,
Cecilia and Emily.[11]
When The Trollopes moved to a leased farm at Harrow-on-the-Hill in 1817,
they faced financial struggles for lack of agricultural expertise.[9]
This was where Frances gave birth to her last two children
[12] Two of her sons also became writers. Her eldest surviving
son,
Thomas Adolphus Trollope, wrote mostly histories: The Girlhood of
Catherine de Medici, History of Florence, What I
Remember, Life of
Pius IX, and some novels. Her fourth son
Anthony Trollope became a well-known and received novelist,
establishing a strong reputation, especially for his serial novels, such
as those set in the fictional county of
Barsetshire, and his political series the
Palliser novels. Despite producing six living children, their marriage
was reputedly unhappy.[4]
Soon after the move to the leased farm, her marital and financial
strains led Frances to seek companionship and aid from
Fanny Wright, ward of the French hero
Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. In 1824 she visited La
Grange, Lafayette's estate in France.[9]
Over the next three years, she made several other visits to France and was
inspired to take an American excursion with Wright. Frances thought of
America as a simple economic venture and figured that she could save money
by sending her children through Wright's communal school, as Wright had
planned to reform the education of African American children and the
formerly enslaved on their property in Tennessee.[11]
In 1827, Frances Trollope took most of her family to
Fanny Wright's
utopian community,
Nashoba Commune, in the United States. Her husband and remaining
family followed shortly after.
Arriving in the United States four years earlier than her husband, she
was able to develop an intimate relationship with
Auguste Hervieu, a collaborator in her venture, and moved to
Cincinnati, Ohio with her sons after the community failed.[9]
She also encouraged the sculptor
Hiram Powers to do
Dante Alighieri's
Commedia in waxworks.
Nonetheless, all the ways she tried to support herself in America were
unsuccessful. She found the cultural climate uninteresting and came to
resent democracy. Furthermore, after her venture failed, her family was
more in debt than when she had migrated there – forcing her and her family
to move back to England in 1831.[9]
From her return at the age of 50 until her death, her need of an income
for her family and escape her debts led her to begin writing novels,
memoirs of her travels, and other shorter pieces, while travelling around
Europe. She became well acquainted with elites and figures of Victorian
literature including
Elizabeth Barrett,
Robert Browning,
Charles Dickens,
Joseph Henry Green and R. W. Thackeray (a relative of
William Makepeace Thackeray). She wrote 40 books: six travelogues, 35
novels, countless controversial articles, and poems. In 1843, Frances
visited Italy and eventually moved to Florence permanently.[13]
Trollope already gained notice with her first book,
Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). She gave an
unfavourable, and in the opinions of America's partisans, an exaggerated
account.
Her novel, The Refugee in America (1832), expressed similar views,
prompting
Catherine Maria Sedgwick to respond that "Mrs. Trollope, though she
has told some disagreeable truths, has for the most part caricatured till
the resemblance is lost."[14]
She was thought to reflect the disparaging views of American society that
were allegedly commonplace at that time among English people of the higher
social classes.
Later Trollope wrote further travel works, such as Belgium and
Western Germany in 1833 (1834), Paris and the Parisians in 1835
(1836), and Vienna and the Austrians (1838).[15]
Among those with whom she became acquainted in Brussels was the future
novelist
Anna Harriett Drury.
Next came The Abbess (1833), an
anti-Catholic novel, as was Father Eustace (1847). While both
borrowed from
Victorian Gothic conventions, the scholar Susan Griffin notes that
Trollope wrote a Protestant critique of Catholicism that also expressed "a
gendered set of possibilities for self-making", which has been little
recognised by scholars. She noted that "Modernism's
lingering legacy in criticism meant overlooking a woman's nineteenth
century studies of religious controversy."[16]
Trollope received more attention in her lifetime for what are
considered several strong novels of social protest: Jonathan Jefferson
Whitlaw (1836) was the first anti-slavery novel, influencing the
American
Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).[17]
It focuses on two powerful families – one that strongly encourages slavery
and another that strongly opposes it and provides sanctuary for slave
refugees. It antagonizes pro-slavery characters, making them appear
foolish and uncultured. Frances also brings out her idea of a
stereotypical American by drawing certain characters as shrewd,
convincing, sly and greedy.[18]
Published in 1840, Michael Armstrong: Factory Boy was the first
industrial novel to be published in Britain, inspired by Frances's
visit to Manchester in 1832, where she examined the conditions of children
employed in the textile mills.[17][19]
The story of a factory boy who is rescued by a wealthy benefactor at
first, but later returns to the mills, illustrates the misery of factory
life and suggests that private philanthropy alone will not solve the
widespread misery of factory employment. Other socially conscious novels
of hers include The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837, Richard Bentley,
London, 3 volumes), which took on the issue of corruption in the
Church of England and evangelical circles. Possibly her greatest work
is the Widow Barnaby trilogy (1839–1855), which includes the first
ever sequel.[20]
In particular,
Michael Sadleir considers the skilful set-up of Petticoat
Government [1850], with its cathedral city, clerical psychology and
domineering female, as something of a formative influence on her son's
elaborate and colourful cast of characters in
Barchester Towers, notably
Mrs Proudie.[21]
In later years Frances Trollope continued to write novels and books on
miscellaneous subjects – in all over 100 volumes. In her own time, she was
considered to have acute powers of observation and a sharp and caustic
wit, but her prolific production coupled with the rise of modernist
criticism caused her works to be overlooked in the 20th century. Few of
her books are now read, but her first and two others are available on
Project Gutenberg.[22]
After the death of her husband and daughter, in 1835 and 1838
respectively, Trollope relocated to
Florence,
Italy, having lived briefly at
Carleton, Eden in Cumbria, but finding that (in her son Tom's words)
"the sun yoked his horses too far from Penrith town."[23]
One year, she invited
Theodosia Garrow to be her house guest. Garrow married her son, Thomas
Adolphus, and the three lived together until Trollope's death in 1863.[24]
She was buried near four other members of the Trollope household in the
English Cemetery of Florence.[25]
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