Frances Trollope

"Frances Trollope’s nature was such that welcomed every ray of sunshine, and diffused it again liberally around her. To her children no holiday was preferable to a tete-a-tete with her” (Trollope, 47), Frances Eleanor Trollope writes of her husband Thomas Adolphus Trollope’s mother, famed novelist and travel writer Frances Milton Trollope. Best known for her unflattering portrayal of young American democracy and “civilization” in Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), "Fanny” was best recognized in her family for her loving nature, great intelligence, and delightful sense of humor. Ironically, however, Americans of the period found Mrs. Trollope to be every bit as crass as the backward peoples she described. Fanny, for her part, entered America a poor, liberal, enterprising, and hopeful mother, and left the country four years later poorer still, conservative, and downtrodden. Yet Fanny ultimately saved her own family through her caricature of American life and her production of pleasing fiction.

Even before her expedition to America, Fanny had experienced a fair share of hardships. Five years after her birth on March 10, 1779, in Stapleton, Bristol, Fanny suffered the loss of her dear mother Mary Milton. Her mother’s death and the subsequent remarriage of her father, William Milton, the vicar of Heckfield, to Sarah Partington of Clifton in 1800 instilled a great deal of self-reliance in the young Fanny. However close Fanny's relationship with Mary was during those five years, the majority of family friends remembered Fanny as bearing the closest resemblance of her two siblings to her father (Neville-Sington, Oxford Dictionary). A vicar by trade, William possessed a keen predilection for science, mathematics, and inventing, and he “preferred inventing gadgets to saving souls” (Neville-Sington, Oxford Dictionary). Both Fanny and her father shared an incapacity for idleness, an inclination for math and mending, and a certain rashness. While other girls were busy sewing, Fanny was indulging in the works of Shakespeare, Milton, and Petrarch (Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope, 7). These cerebral qualities, along with her bright and pleasant persona, made her a delight in society, among friends, and to her beloved mother.

Fanny’s family with Thomas provided a source of great joy and despair in her life. Five years after moving to London with her brother and sister in 1803, Fanny met barrister Thomas Trollope, and in 1809, they married. Living at first on Keppel Street, the same street where she had shared a house with her siblings a few years prior, the Trollopes immediately began their family, first with Fanny’s beloved son Thomas Adolphus (Tom) in 1810. Over the next eight years Fanny gave birth to six other children: Henry, Arthur, Emily (who lived one day), Anthony, Cecilia, and Emily. Cecilia and Emily (the youngest) were born after the family’s move to Harrow-on-the-Hill, the leased farm at which Mr. Trollope built a house. The family moved there in 1817 (Trollope, 42). Unfortunately, farming did not agree with Mr. Trollope; Thomas's complete lack of agricultural expertise, along with the unexpected denial of his uncle’s inheritance and the strain of sending five sons to Winchester for schooling, slowing crippled the family’s finances (Neville-Sington, Oxford Dictionary).

Fanny maintained her Victorian stoicism in her lack of outward reaction to their dire circumstances. In her vast collection of correspondence, she makes only one reference to Thomas's temper and virtually no mention of the Trollopes' financial problems. Fanny only revealed her feelings and family life in her later novels, in which she devised stories of strained husband-wife and husband-son relationships with the knowledge of someone who had personally experienced such tension and sorrow. Her novel One Fault traces the breakdown of a marriage, while spousal verbal abuse is prevalent in Romance of Vienna. In Fashionable Life, Fanny writes, “We are often told that the first falling in love is an important epoch in existence… Perhaps the first time of falling into anger, may also be an important epoch, and produce a great change.” Through a rather cathartic writing style, Fanny drew strength from her anger (Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope, 111). Fanny also proved she could think independently from her husband, and relied upon her female friends as her husband became more of a distant stranger. The friendships Fanny developed at Harrow proved invaluable, and through these acquaintances and relationships Fanny was introduced to Fanny Wright.

Fanny Wright may rightly be considered responsible for Fanny Trollope’s American journey. Wright, the ward of French hero General Lafayette, became an intimate friend of the Trollopes, and secured an invitation in 1824 for the family to visit La Grange, Lafayette’s estate in France. The subsequent visits of the family to France over the next three years ultimately sparked in Fanny the idea of an American excursion. Wright and her sister had plans to travel to their property in Tennessee to begin to reform the education of Afican American children. When Henry dropped out of Winchester in 1826, the Trollopes struggled to discover an occupation for the young man; the family’s financial state would not allow for an indolent son and neither would Mr. Trollope. With the help of General Lafayette the Trollopes secured a position for Henry in a Parisian office. However, the city proved too much for Henry alone, and a new solution was required (Trollope, 77-85).

Fanny came to view America as an opportunity to mend multiple issues: in America she could cheaply educate Henry (as well as her two young daughters) at the Wrights’ school while also solving the family’s monetary woes. Fanny believed America to be an easy money-making venture, and she and Mr. Trollope devised plans to establish a bazaar or emporium for imported fancy goods in Cincinnati (Trollope, 99). Wright wrote and encouraged Fanny to bring Henry to America; Henry also added pressure by constantly telling Fanny that his future was in America (Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope, 109). Fanny’s devotion to Henry was very closely linked to the loss of her son Arthur, who died of consumption at age twelve (Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope, 105). Fanny poured much of herself into bettering Henry and providing the clearest and safest path to a secure future. Self-reliant and courageous as always, Fanny, along with Henry, Cecilia, Emily, and close family friend Auguste Hervieu, set out in November of 1827 for America; Mr. Trollope and Tom were to follow before long. Father and son ultimately did come for a time to America, but in 1831, the entire family returned to England, further in debt and with little hope.

America drastically changed Fanny Trollope. Some have read a marital rift in the period of separation between husband and wife and the intimacy between Fanny Trollope and Auguste Hervieu, collaborator in the speculative scheme of the bazaar. Monetarily, the family emerged in worse debt, mostly due to the failed bazaar. Fanny herself came to America a liberal and determined woman, but her disappointing experience with Fanny Wright's utopian scheme and the dreary cultural climate Trollope perceived in Cincinnati and elsewhere transformed her views; she returned to England fiercely opposed to democracy and to its resulting “universal degradation” (Pope-Hennessy, 107). Such vehemence is readily apparent in Domestic Manners. While her political views changed, Trollope’s optimism and industriousness did not diminish, and she published the memoir of her travels in 1833.

"No English persons of that day were ever prepared to admit that they were not generally attractive and superior to every foreigner they met,” and Frances Trollope’s criticism of America perpetuated this strong sense of English pride (Pope-Hennessy, 16). Her reputation and persona, created in Domestic Manners, superseded her, and many who met her were surprised to find her a “most elegant and agreeable woman” (Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope, 342). If taken alone, Domestic Manners presents a somewhat different understanding of her journey than the reality. Trollope excludes all details that do not reflect solely on the Americans; she offers no mention of the bazaar, Hervieu, finances, or Nashoba, the Wrights’ Tennessee venture, and rarely speaks of her children.

Her book presents a woman who left her husband, uprooted her children, and traveled to America, where she flitted about making judgments of its people before returning back to England a few years after. The truth is altogether different. Throughout Trollope's sojourn in America, Hervieu assisted her in her personal mission to save her family not only from their financial troubles but more importantly from themselves. Regardless of what some saw as her questionable morality, her book became an instant success and even spawned the verb “to trollopise,” meaning to sermonize on experiences (Pope-Hennessy, 16). Many Americans and Europeans alike attacked Mrs. Trollope, professing: “Although Mrs. Trollope maintained that the standard of moral character in the United States was greatly lower than that of Europe, she herself was considered something of a profligate woman” (Farewell). Her book received both praise and abuse, but above all it saved her family and made her famous.

From the age of fifty until her death thirty years later, Trollope published thirty-five novels and six travel books, enabling her to support her family through her writing (Neville-Sington, Oxford Dictionary). Travel writing had proved a popular and profitable form; Captain Basil Hall’s Travels In North America had created a feeling of ill-feeling towards America, fostering a hungry market anticipating the next anti-American literature (Farewell). Unfortunately, debt quickly swallowed the vast majority of Trollope’s earnings. In the decade following the publication of Domestic Manners, the Trollopes moved from place to place in an effort to escape the debt that continued to plague the family. Although under the threat of debtor’s prison, Trollope maintained her amicability and pursued her love of hosting parties and having polite but intellectually stimulating conversations. Her guest list grew to include Joseph Henry Green (Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s literary executor), as well as Reverend R.W. Thackeray (William Thackeray’s relative) and his family (Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope, 253). Trollope often worked on multiple books at once, and continued to write through the deaths of her son Henry, her husband, and her daughter Emily between 1834 and 1836. Even in the midst of such heartbreak, her literary works “never bore the shadow of her circumstances. They were as bright at the first as when, later, circumstances brightened” (Glasgow Herald).

Self-disciplined as always, she managed to maintain her writing schedule. As she continued to travel, she wrote of her experiences on the European continent and of the affluent people she met. Her son the successful novelist Anthony commented in An Autobiography that “she was at her table at four in the morning, and had finished her work before the world had begun to be aroused.” She lived close to her daughter Cecilia until Cecilia married in 1841, and in 1843 Trollope fulfilled her dream of visiting Italy and moved to Florence permanently. In Florence she continued her role of hosting dinner parties and attracted such literary elites as Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. In 1844, Charles Dickens arrived for his first tour of Italy. Tom became friends with the thirty-three-year-old Dickens, to whom Fanny also appeared partial. Trollope was fond of including allusions to Dickens’s works within her own novels, showing admiration and respect for her fellow author (Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope, 315). During this time, in 1849, she lost Cecilia to tuberculosis, the same cause of death as for her other family members. Remaining in Florence, Fanny shared the Villino Trollope with her son Anthony and his wife from 1850 on. Her health steadily deteriorated and she died peacefully in bed on October 6, 1863 (Neville-Sington, Oxford Dictionary.

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