Frances Trollope

Frances Trollope was one of the most remarkable women of the nineteenth century — a writer who began publishing at fifty-two, produced over forty novels and six travel books in the next twenty-five years, rescued her family from financial ruin through sheer literary productivity, and wrote at least three books that retain genuine historical and literary importance. She is now remembered primarily for Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), the wittiest and most devastating account of American society ever written by a foreign visitor, but in her own time she was equally known as a pioneering social-problem novelist whose books on slavery, child labour, and evangelical hypocrisy preceded Dickens’s engagement with similar themes by several years.

The American Disaster

Frances Milton was born in Stapleton, near Bristol, in 1779. She married Thomas Anthony Trollope, a barrister, in 1809. The marriage was respectable but financially precarious — Thomas Trollope was an intelligent man who systematically failed at everything he attempted. In 1827, inspired by the utopian reformer Frances Wright, Frances Trollope embarked on one of the most extraordinary adventures of the period: she sailed to America with three of her children and attempted to establish a commercial emporium — the Trollope Bazaar — in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The venture was a catastrophic failure. The bazaar went bankrupt. Frances Trollope spent three years in America — in Cincinnati, along the Mississippi, in Washington, and in the Eastern cities — observing American manners with an increasingly sardonic eye. She returned to England in 1831 to find her husband’s finances in ruins and her family threatened with destitution.

Domestic Manners of the Americans

Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) was written out of financial desperation — Frances Trollope needed money, and she had a subject. The book was a triumph. Combining sharp social observation with witty, often devastating prose, it catalogued the features of American life that appalled a well-bred Englishwoman: the constant spitting of tobacco juice, the bolting of food, the worship of money, the subjection of women, the tyranny of public opinion, the absence of intellectual culture, and — most fundamentally — the gap between American democratic rhetoric and American democratic reality.

The book was an immediate bestseller in England and a sensation in America, where it was both furiously denounced and surreptitiously read. Mark Twain later called it “the most accurate picture of us ever painted by a foreigner.” Charles Dickens, planning his own American trip a decade later, read it carefully and found many of Trollope’s observations confirmed.

The Social-Problem Novels

What is less well known is that Frances Trollope was a pioneering social-problem novelist. Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836) was one of the first novels in English to depict American slavery in graphic, horrifying detail — it preceded Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin by sixteen years. Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840) was a novel about child labour in English cotton mills that preceded Dickens’s similar treatment in The Old Curiosity Shop and drew on Frances Trollope’s own visits to Manchester factories. Jessie Phillips (1843) dealt with the cruelties of the New Poor Law.

The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837) was a satirical novel about an evangelical clergyman who uses his religious authority to manipulate and control his parishioners — an attack on the Evangelical movement that was considered scandalous but that anticipated Trollope’s son Anthony’s more nuanced treatment of clerical life in the Barsetshire novels.

Productivity and Craft

Frances Trollope published 114 volumes in twenty-five years — an output that was staggering even by Victorian standards. Her later novels — including the Widow Barnaby trilogy (The Widow Barnaby, 1839; The Widow Married, 1840; The Barnabys in America, 1843) — were commercial entertainments that kept the family solvent. Anthony Trollope, who witnessed his mother’s discipline firsthand, attributed his own famous work ethic to her example: he wrote that she “weights the woe of the world with industry.”

Her travel books — Paris and the Parisians (1836), Vienna and the Austrians (1838), A Visit to Italy (1842) — were popular and well-observed, though none achieved the impact of Domestic Manners.

Legacy

Frances Trollope’s reputation has been almost entirely eclipsed by her son’s, but she deserves to be remembered in her own right — as the author of Domestic Manners, as a pioneering social novelist, and as a woman who reinvented herself at fifty and sustained a family through her pen. The recent scholarly recovery of her work has emphasised the radicalism of her social novels and their anticipation of themes that later Victorian novelists are usually credited with introducing.

Collecting Trollope

Domestic Manners of the Americans (Whittaker, Treacher, 1832) in first edition is a significant collecting target — an important Americana title. The social-problem novels — Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836), Michael Armstrong (1840), Jessie Phillips (1843) — are scarce and collected for their historical importance. First editions of Frances Trollope are generally scarcer than her son’s, as print runs were smaller and the books were read hard.