Frances Trollope
Encyclopedia
Domestic Manners of the Americans
Domestic Manners of the Americans is an 1832 travel book by Frances Trollope, which follows her travels through America and her residence in Cincinnati, at the time still a frontier town...
(1832) has been the best known, but she also published strong social novels: an anti-slavery novel said to influence the work of the American Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a depiction of life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom...
, the first industrial novel
Industrial novel
The industrial novel is a genre of early Victorian literature. A subclass of the social novel, it portrays the difficult conditions of life of the urban working class during the Industrial Revolution...
, and two anti-Catholic novels that used a Protestant position to examine self-making. Recent scholars note that modernist critics tended to exclude women writers such as Frances Trollope from serious consideration.
Her detractors familiarly called her by the diminutive Fanny Trollope, considered slightly vulgar, and discounted her prolific production. Her first and third sons, Thomas Adolphus
Thomas Adolphus Trollope
Thomas Adolphus Trollope was born in Bloomsbury, London on 29 April 1810, the eldest son of Thomas Anthony & Frances Trollope . He was educated at Harrow School and Winchester College...
and Anthony
Anthony Trollope
Anthony Trollope was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works, collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire...
, also became writers; Anthony Trollope became respected for his social novels.
Biography
Born at Stapleton, BristolStapleton, Bristol
Stapleton is an area in the north-eastern suburbs of the city of Bristol, England. The name is colloquially used today to describe the ribbon village along Bell Hill and Park Road in the Frome Valley. It borders Eastville to the South and Begbrook and Frenchay to the North...
, Frances Milton at the age of 30 married Thomas A. Trollope, a barrister
Barrister
A barrister is a member of one of the two classes of lawyer found in many common law jurisdictions with split legal professions. Barristers specialise in courtroom advocacy, drafting legal pleadings and giving expert legal opinions...
, on 23 May 1809 at Heckfield, Hampshire. They had four sons and three daughters, and he struggled with financial misfortune.
In 1827 Frances Trollope took her family to Fanny Wright's utopian community, Nashoba Commune
Nashoba Commune
Nashoba Commune was an experimental project of Fanny Wright, initiated in 1825 to educate and emancipate slaves. It was located in a 2,000-acre woodland on the side of present-day Germantown, Tennessee, a Memphis suburb, along the Wolf River...
, in the United States. This community soon failed, and she ended up in Cincinnati, Ohio with her sons. Although she tried to find ways to support herself, they were unsuccessful. She encouraged the sculptor Hiram Powers
Hiram Powers
Hiram Powers was an American neoclassical sculptor.-Biography:The son of a farmer, Powers was born in Woodstock, Vermont, on the July 29, 1805. In 1818 his father moved to Ohio, about six miles from Cincinnati, where the son attended school for about a year, staying meanwhile with his brother, a...
to do Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
's Commedia in waxworks. After her return to England, she began writing to support her family.
Two sons also became writers: her eldest surviving son, Thomas Adolphus Trollope
Thomas Adolphus Trollope
Thomas Adolphus Trollope was born in Bloomsbury, London on 29 April 1810, the eldest son of Thomas Anthony & Frances Trollope . He was educated at Harrow School and Winchester College...
, 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
Anthony Trollope
Anthony Trollope was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works, collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire...
became the better known and received novelist, establishing a strong reputation, especially for his serial novels such as The Pallisers
Palliser novels
The Palliser novels are six novels by Anthony Trollope.The common thread is the wealthy aristocrat and politician Plantagenet Palliser and his wife Lady Glencora...
.
Writing career
On her return to England, Trollope began writing and gained notice with her first book, Domestic Manners of the AmericansDomestic Manners of the Americans
Domestic Manners of the Americans is an 1832 travel book by Frances Trollope, which follows her travels through America and her residence in Cincinnati, at the time still a frontier town...
(1832). She gave an unfavourable and, in the opinions of partisans of America, exaggerated account of the subject. She was thought to reflect the disparaging views of American society allegedly commonplace at that time among English people of the higher social classes. The book is also acerbic and witty. Her novel, The Refugee in America (1832), expressed similar views.
Next came The Abbess (1833), an anti-Catholic novel, as was Father Eustace (1847). While they 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
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
's lingering legacy in criticism meant overlooking a woman's nineteenth century studies of religious controversy."
Trollope wrote more travel works, such as Belgium and Western Germany in 1833 (1834), Paris and the Parisians in 1835 (1836), and Vienna and the Austrians (1838).
She received more attention during 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
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a depiction of life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom...
's Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman....
(1852).
Michael Armstrong: Factory Boy began publication in 1840 and was the first industrial novel
Industrial novel
The industrial novel is a genre of early Victorian literature. A subclass of the social novel, it portrays the difficult conditions of life of the urban working class during the Industrial Revolution...
to be published in Britain. Other socially conscious novels included The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837 / Richard Bentley, London, 3 volumes), which took on corruption in the Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
and evangelical circles. Possibly her greatest work is the Widow Barnaby trilogy (1839–1855). This set a pattern of sequels which her son Anthony Trollope also used in his oeuvre.
In later years Mrs. Trollope continued to write novels and books on miscellaneous subjects, writing in all over 100 volumes. She was considered to have powers of observation and a sharp and caustic wit, but her prolific production and the rise of modernist criticism caused her works to be overlooked in the twentieth century. Few of her books are now read, but her first and two others are available on Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...
. For a full list of her works, see Frances Trollope bibliography
Frances Trollope bibliography
This is a bibliography of the works of Frances Trollope.-Novels:*The Refugee in America *The Abess: A Romance *Tremordyn Cliff *The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw: or Scenes on the Mississippi...
.
After the death of her husband and daughter, in 1835 and 1838 respectively, Trollope relocated to Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
, Italy, where she lived until her death in 1863. She was buried near four other members of the Trollope household in the English Cemetery of Florence.
Major Works
- Domestic Manners of the AmericansDomestic Manners of the AmericansDomestic Manners of the Americans is an 1832 travel book by Frances Trollope, which follows her travels through America and her residence in Cincinnati, at the time still a frontier town...
(1832) - Belgium and Western Germany in 1833 (1834)
- Paris and the Parisians in 1835 (1836)
- Vienna and the Austrians (1838)
- Michael Armstrong: Factory Boy (published in 1840)
- Jessie Phillips: A Tale of the Present Day
- The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or Scenes on the Mississippi
- The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, The Factory Boy
- The Lottery of Marriage
- The Vicar of Wrexhill
- The Widow Barnaby
- The Widow Married; A Sequel to the Widow Barnaby
- The Widow Wedded; or The Adventures of the Barnabys in America
External links
- Frances Trollope: 1779–1863—Bio and links to overviews of major works
- Three Voices: Frances Trollope – The author describes her life in Cincinnati, Cincinnati Library
- Mrs. Trollope's Bazaar, Cincinnati, Ohio 1828–1829, Cincinnati Memory
- "Mrs. Trollope's America", Vanity Fair, June 2007
