Frances Trollope

English writer

• Born: March 10, 1779
• Birthplace: Heckfield, Hampshire, England
• Died: October 6, 1863
• Place of death: Florence, Italy

One of the most widely read authors of her time, Trollope played a major role in shaping English literature by popularizing the use of fiction-writing techniques in travel books. She also wrote the first novels to decry slavery and evangelical excess, promote the rights of women, and expose social injustice.

Early Life

Frances Trollope (TRAHL-uhp) was born Frances Milton, the daughter and third child of the Reverend William Milton and Mary Milton (née Grisley), three of whose six children died in infancy. Nicknamed Fanny, she grew up with an older sister, Mary, and younger brother, Henry. After her mother died around 1784, her father raised the children and served as clerk of holy orders at a Bristol church. Oxford-educated and an avid inventor, he also designed coaches and a tidal bypass system.

Typical of the English girls of her time, Fanny did not receive a formal education. She took lessons in music and art, and gained fluency in Latin, French, and Italian. She may have attended a school for girls, but no records of her doing so exist. In 1801, when Fanny was twenty-two, her father remarried and became the vicar of Heckfield. Fanny and her sister moved to their brother’s house in London two years later. Bright and outspoken, Fanny enjoyed a busy social life and attended many cultural performances.

In 1808, when Fanny was twenty-nine, she met Thomas Anthony Trollope, a thirty-five-year-old barrister. She married him on May 23, 1809, and Fanny bore seven children in nine years. Tom arrived in 1810, followed by Henry in 1811, Arthur in 1812, Emily in 1813 (died the same day), Anthony (the noted novelist) in 1815, Cecilia in 1816, and another Emily in 1818.

From 1809 through 1815, the family lived in London and employed many servants. After Fanny’s husband began suffering migraine headaches and fits of rage, they moved to Julians Manor on a leased farm in Harrow. Fanny’s drawing room there became the center of the town’s social activity, with political radicals often in attendance. By 1824, her husband’s migraines had forced him to give up practicing law. During that same year, Fanny’s son Arthur died of tuberculosis. Deeply in debt, the family moved to a dilapidated farmhouse in 1827.

Life’s Work

In November, 1827, Fanny Trollope accepted the invitation of British abolitionist Frances Wright and sailed to America with her daughters, her son Henry, the French artist and exiled political refugee Auguste Hervieu, and two servants. Their intended destination was Nashoba, Wright’s utopian community in Tennessee. On their arrival there, they discovered a malaria-infested outpost with little food or sanitation. Trollope borrowed three hundred dollars and went to Cincinnati.

Faced with bills and no income, Trollope teamed with Hervieu and others to produce The Invisible Girl at the Western Museum in April, 1828. The show attracted large crowds and ran eight weeks. Three months later, they staged another profitable performance based on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1321). Buoyed by these successes, Trollope built a cultural center using money inherited from her father. Trollope despised many American social practices, most notably the public separation of men and women, and envisioned a center in which the sexes could mingle. The finished structure, mockingly called “Trollope’s Folly,” employed a cacophony of architectural styles. The venture flopped, and she lost her entire investment.

In March, 1830, Trollope moved with her children to Washington, D.C. Sixteen months later, they returned to England with Hervieu. Trollope had relied financially on Hervieu during nearly her entire stay in America, and he paid for her passage home.

Trollope kept detailed notebooks during her time in America, and within months of her return she published a manuscript detailing her experiences. Domestic Manners of the Americans , her unflattering portrayal of American social structures, appeared in 1832. The book’s American readers expressed outrage, and English critics maligned it as vulgar, but it sold well in both countries. Trollope’s second book, The Refugee in America: A Novel , also came out in 1832. Driven by financial necessity, she wrote every morning from 4 a.m. until breakfast, then undertook her familial duties. She followed this schedule throughout her entire working life.

Trollope was fifty-three years old when she published her first book. Over the next twenty-five years, she wrote 115 successful books, including works of travel, commentaries, and gothic, detective, romance, and humorous novels. She tackled socially charged subjects, such as slavery and patriarchy, and satirized the London social scene. Her settings often mirror the places and people she knew, and reflect the manners and styles of her day. She is now best known for her travel books. However, after publishing her sixth travel book, Vienna and the Austrians (1838), she decided that travel costs absorbed too much of her profits and turned to novels.

Trollope published The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw: Or, Scenes of the Mississippi , the first novel to protest slavery in America, in 1836, sixteen years before Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in the United States. Among Trollope’s other social commentaries, The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837) exposed the religious excess of the evangelical church. Critics judged that topic a scandalous one for a woman writer, and the book became one of her best sellers. The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy decried child labor practices in northern England. It appeared in serial installments beginning in February, 1839. Eight years later, the Factory Act of 1847 forbade the employment old in textile mills of children under eight years of age.

Despite her commercial success, Trollope repeatedly teetered on the brink of financial collapse and suffered several heartbreaking losses. Creditors seized the family farm in 1834, and the family fled to Belgium to keep her husband out of debtor’s prison. Later during that same year, her son Henry died in Bruges, and her husband died the following October. In January, 1836, Trollope and her daughter Emily moved to a village near London. Emily died a month later.

Trollope’s fiction appealed to common tastes, and her free-spirited behavior kept her name in the headlines. Through a twenty-year period that began in the 1830’s, her novels consistently ranked among the most popular in Britain. By 1839, she commanded eight hundred pounds per manuscript—a large sum equivalent to about four thousand dollars in the United States at that time. Nevertheless, Trollope was still struggling with her debts in 1840, when she was at the age of sixty-one. In 1842, she built a home in Penrith, near her daughter Cecilia in northern England, but vacated the property in 1843 because the cold weather and lack of a social life did not suit her.

By 1852, Trollope was living in Florence, Italy, in the home of her son Tom and his wife. She published her last book, the third volume of Fashionable Life: Or, Paris and London , in 1856. On October 6, 1863, she died peacefully during her sleep in Florence.

Significance

Frances Trollope was one of the most popular and influential English writers of her time. Her first novel, Domestic Manners of the Americans, gained such renown that “trollope” became slang for an ill-mannered person. It also popularized the use of personal opinion and lively characterization in travel writing. Trollope’s influence can also be seen in the work of such better-known contemporary writers as Charles Dickens and her own son Anthony Trollope. Dickens praised Trollope’s observations about America and visited her in Italy. Her son became a highly regarded author and freely borrowed plots and characters from her work.

Fanny Trollope undermined sexist conventions and advanced the cause of women writers. She produced socially and politically themed novels on a par with those of male authors and portrayed friendships among women in a positive light. As the only female novelist of her time to have two books serialized concurrently, she demonstrated that women possess the drive required to meet the special demands of serial publishing.

Trollope’s popularity declined as Victorian morals became stricter. After 1883, her books were not reprinted. However, around the turn of the twenty-first century, several new biographies of Trollope recognized the important role she played in shaping modern literature. Scholars also attribute the renewed interest to the vigor with which she advocated social change.

Bibliography

Ayres, Brenda, ed. Frances Trollope and the Novel of Social Change. London: Greenwood Press, 2002. This collection of essays provides a discussion of Trollope’s work in terms of its subject matter and includes chapters on her personal history and literary importance.

Neville-Sington, Pamela. Fanny Trollope, The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman. New York: Viking Press, 1998. A thoroughly researched account of Trollope’s life and travels, the book includes thirty illustrations and a bibliography of Trollope’s books.

Ransom, Teresa. Fanny Trollope: A Remarkable Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. This book provides a detailed account of Trollope’s travels, family life, and writings. Along with black-and-white family photos and reproductions of sketches originally printed in her books, it includes a family tree and a chronological bibliography of Trollope’s books. The postscript excerpts her obituaries and summarizes the lives of her children and grandchildren.

Simmons, James C. Star-Spangled Eden, Nineteenth Century America Through the Eyes of Dickens, Wilde, Frances Trollope, Frank Harris, and Other British Travelers. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2000. The first chapter in this compilation of essays discusses the influence of Jacksonian America on Trollope and her writing.

Trollope, Frances. Domestic Manners of the Americans. Reprint. New York: Dover, 2003. Inexpensive reprint of Trollope’s most important book, whose text is also freely available in electronic format on Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org).