Frances Trollope

By Carolyn Lambert

By the standards of any age, Frances (Fanny) Trollope was an extraordinary woman who led an extraordinary life. She did not begin writing until she was 53, but in the 24 years between 1832 and 1856 she produced no fewer than 40 books, comprising 150 volumes. Her impulse was to save her family from financial ruin. / The Mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, she was born at Stapleton near Bristol on 10 March 1779. She lived through tumultuous events: the madness of George III, the Napoleonic wars, the French Revolution and the threat of civil war in Italy.  The political, economic and social upheavals of the age were mirrored by Trollope’s own restless travels through Europe and America, driven by the need to support her family and by her own thirst for company and social and intellectual stimulation. / She drew unashamedly on her own experiences, the people she met on her travels and her large circle of friends and acquaintances to produce her copious range of novels and travel books.  She was prolific, critically well-received and very popular.  It is puzzling to know why she has apparently been marginalised and largely over-looked, particularly given the radical and  controversial nature of much of her writing, combined with her unerring eye for the pretentious, exuberant comic sense, and sardonic wit.  This book exposes the reasons for Trollope’s unjustified neglect and seeks to give her the recognition she deserves. / Contents: Ch.1. Life and Adventures;C h.2. The Lottery of Marriage; Ch.3. The Spirit of Place; Ch.4. The Mother’s Manua; Ch.5. A Tale of the Present Day; Ch.6. Conclusion

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edward Everett Root
• Release date: Jul 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781912224982

Carolyn Lambert

Carolyn Lambert is a visiting lecturer at the University of Brighton where she teaches nineteenth-century literature.  She is the author of The Meanings of Home in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction (2013) and co-editor with Marion Shaw of For Better, For Worse: Marriage in Victorian Novels by Women (2017).  She has a chapter entitled ‘Female Voices in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton’ in a forthcoming publication from Bloomsbury edited by Adrienne E Gavin and Carolyn W de la Oulton.

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Frances Trollope

Frances Trollope

Carolyn Lambert

Visiting Lecturer in English, University of Brighton

EER

Edward Everett Root, Publishers, Brighton, 2020.

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Carolyn Lambert, Frances Trollope

Key Popular Women Writers series, Volume 5.

First published in Great Britain in 2020.

© Carolyn Lambert 2020.

This edition © Edward Everett Root 2020.

ISBN: 978-1-912224-96-8 Paperback

ISBN: 978-1-912224-97-5 Hardback

ISBN: 978-1-912224-98-2 eBook

Carolyn Lambert has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 as the owner of this Work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

Cover designed by Pageset Limited, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.

Series editors:

Janine Hatter and Helena Ifill.

This innovative new series delivers original and transformative, peer reviewed, feminist research into the work of leading women writers who were widely read in their time, but who have been under-represented in the canon.

The series offers critical, historical and aesthetic contributions to current literary and theoretical work. Each volume concentrates on one writer.

The first five titles are available:

• Geraldine Jewsbury by Abigail Burnham Bloom.

• Florence Marryat by Catherine Pope.

• Margaret Oliphant by Valerie Sanders.

• Mrs. Henry Wood by Mariaconcetta Costantini.

• Frances Trollope by Carolyn Lambert.

These will be followed by volumes on:

• Mary Braddon • Mary Shelley

• Rhoda Broughton • Marie Corelli

• Daphne Du Maurier • Charlotte Riddell

• Ouida • Edith Wharton

We welcome suggestions for other titles.

The series volumes interrogate the ways in which women writers, their creative processes and published material can be considered feminist, and explore how recent developments in feminist theory can enrich our understanding of popular women writer’s lives and literature.

The authors rethink established popular writers and their works, and rediscover and re-evaluate authors who have been largely neglected – often since their initial burst of success in their own historical period. This neglect is often due to the exclusivity and insular nature of the canon which has its roots in the Victorian critical drive to perpetuate a division between high and low culture.

In response, our definition of the popular is broadly interpreted to encompass women writers who were read by large sections of the public, and who wrote for the mass publishing market. The series therefore challenges this arbitrary divide, creating a new and dynamic dialogue regarding the canon’s expansion by introducing readers to previously under-researched women writers who were nevertheless prolific, known and influential.

Studying the work of these authors can tell us much about women’s writing, creativity and publishing practice, and about how popular fiction intervened in pressing political, social and cultural issues surrounding gender, history and women’s roles in society.

This is an important and timely series that is inspired by, interrogates, and speaks to a new wave of feminism, new definitions of sex and gender, and new considerations of inter-sectionality. It also reflects growing interest in popular fiction, as well as a feminist desire to broaden and diversify the literary canon.

Ultimately the series sheds light on women writers whose work deserves greater recognition, facilitates and inspires further research, and paves the way for introducing these key women writers into the canon and modern-day studies.

The editors

DR. JANINE HATTER is an Early Career Researcher based at the University of Hull. With Nickianne Moody she has edited the volume Fashion and Material Culture in Victorian Fiction and Periodicals, already published by EER. Her research interests centre on nineteenth-century literature, art and culture, with particular emphasis on popular fiction. She has published on Mary Braddon, Bram Stoker, the theatre and identity, and Victorian women’s life writing, as well as on her wider research interests of nineteenth to twenty-first century Science Fiction and the Gothic. She has also co-edited special issues for Revenant, Supernatural Studies, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Femspec and the Wilkie Collins Journal. Janine is conference co-organiser for the Victorian Popular Fiction Association, and co-founded the Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association.

DR. HELENA IFILL is a Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Aberdeen where she is the Director of the Centre for the Novel. Her research focuses on the interactions between Victorian popular fiction, (pseudo)science and medicine. She is the Secretary of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association and a co-organiser of the Association’s annual conference. As well as her monograph, Creating Character: Theories of Nature and Nurture in Victorian Sensation Fiction (2018), she has published work on Charlotte Riddell, Florence Marryat, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, and Victorian mesmerism. She has also co-edited special issues for Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and the Wilkie Collins Journal.

The author

CAROLYN LAMBERT is a visiting lecturer at the University of Brighton where she teaches nineteenth-century literature. She is the author of The Meanings of Home in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction (2013) and co-editor with Marion Shaw of For Better, For Worse: Marriage in Victorian Novels by Women (2017). She has a chapter entitled ‘The Female Voice and Industrial Fiction: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton’ in British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 1: 1840s and 1850s. Adrienne E. Gavin and Carolyn W de la L Oulton eds. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1. Marriage

Chapter 2. Family

Chapter 3. Social Reform

Chapter 4. Travel Writing

Conclusion

Notes

Appendix 1: Publishing History

Bibliography

Preface

There are always challenges in reclaiming an unjustly neglected writer. This is compounded in the case of Frances Milton Trollope by what might best be described as a surfeit of Trollopes. Frances Trollope was the matriarch of a family of writers, ironically now over-shadowed by her own progeny, as well as being marginalized because of her gender and her son Anthony’s literary matricide. Strong words, but we are dealing with a woman who never shied away from controversy. The sheer number of writing Trollopes, as well as the number of identical first names within the family, has led to some practical problems. Frances Milton Trollope was married to Thomas Anthony Trollope and they had a son, Thomas Adolphus (Tom). The second wife of Thomas Adolphus was the novelist Frances Eleanor Trollope, who also wrote the first biography of her mother-in-law, whom she never actually met. Frances Eleanor Trollope’s biography however, is now the only extant record we have of many of the Trollope family letters. I have chosen to deal with this surfeit of Trollopes in a number of ways. Wherever possible, I have referred to Frances Milton Trollope as Trollope, following feminist convention of allotting her a gender-neutral nomenclature. Where this might lead to a lack of clarity, I have used the abbreviation Fanny, by which she was always known to her family and friends. I have mostly used Christian names for her sons and her husband.

As other scholars have pointed out, there is a dearth of scholarly, or even non-scholarly, copies of Trollope’s texts that are readily available. Pickering and Chatto, together with the group of women scholars who edited the texts, are to be commended for their work in re-issuing four of Trollope’s social problem novels, the three Widow Barnaby novels and The Lottery of Marriage (1849). I have made extensive use of these editions. Otherwise I have relied on the scanned first editions of texts available from the Hathi Trust – an invaluable resource. I hope this book may encourage publishers to re-issue further scholarly editions of Trollope’s work – she is well worth it! Selecting texts from such a prolific author will always be contentious and I plead guilty to having included some of my own favourites for discussion. Overall, I have tried to pick a balanced choice of texts that reflect the extraordinary variety of Trollope’s oeuvre, focusing thematically on those issues that show longevity throughout her writing career. Inevitably, in a book of this length, there are texts that it has not been possible to include, but which are of formative interest in terms of the canon: Lucy Sussex’s discussion of Hargrave (1843) as an early crime novel is one example.¹ I felt however it was essential to include a discussion of Trollope’s travel writing because of the importance she herself accorded it. More work however remains to be done on links between the travel writing and the novels.

Thanks as always are due to Janine Hatter and Helena Ifill who have provided untiring support, and answers to pernickety questions about style and layout, as well as unfailing encouragement. Thank you to Jenny Bourne-Taylor who read an early version of the first chapter and, together with the anonymous peer reviewers, enabled me to mould it into a more tenacious shape, worthier of its feisty subject. My husband, whom my daughters describe as their favourite feminist, has lived up to his reputation once again in providing moral and actual support in the form of food and drink, as well as sharing the ultimate Trollope experience of re-tracing her steps down the salt-mine at Hallein!

Introduction

A forgotten novelist

By the standards of any age, Frances Milton Trollope was an extraordinary woman who led an extraordinary life. Born at Stapleton near Bristol on 10 March 1779, she lived through the madness of George III, the Napoleonic wars, the French Revolution and the threat of civil war in Italy. The political, economic and social upheavals of the age were mirrored by Trollope’s own restless travels through Europe and America, driven by the need to support her family, and by her own thirst for company and social and intellectual stimulation. She drew unashamedly on her own experiences, the people she met on her travels, and her large circle of friends and acquaintances to produce her copious range of novels and travel books. She did not begin writing until she was fifty-three, but in the twenty four years between 1832 and 1856 produced no fewer than forty books, comprising one hundred and fifteen volumes. She was prolific, contentious, and very popular. It is therefore puzzling to know why she has apparently been marginalised and largely over-looked, particularly given the radical and controversial nature of much of her writing, combined with her unerring eye for the pretentious, exuberant comic sense, and sardonic wit.

Trollope’s versatility is astonishing, as is her creativity in working across genres and in tackling controversial subjects. She produced an impressive number of literary firsts: the first anti-slavery novel, Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836), pre-dating Richard Hildreth’s Archy Moore (1836) by six months and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by sixteen years; the first series of novels focusing on the same character, (the eponymous Widow Barnaby novels); the first novel both to be serialised by a woman and to describe child labour in industrial areas, Michael Armstrong the Factory Boy (1840); the first full-length exposure of evangelical excesses in The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837); the first attack on the bastardy clauses of the New Poor Law in Jessie Phillips (1843); and a travel book, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), which became the touchstone against which subsequent accounts of the United States were judged. As Lucy Sussex (2011) argues, she also made a significant contribution to the early development of the English crime novel.¹ Over twenty four eventful years, she wrote a total of thirty four novels and six travel books. As the anonymous critic in The Saturday Review noted: the story of Frances Trollope and her one hundred and fifteen volumes perpetrated in twenty-four years arouses the same sensations in the reader as a newspaper report of the birth of triplets. One wonders not, however, in the spirit of the Pharisee, if these people are of the common clay, and one concludes still wondering that they are not (Francis Trollope: Her Books, 1895: 841). Yet George Newcomen, writing a year later, bluntly states: Frances Trollope is now a forgotten novelist to many (1896: 171).

This book reclaims Trollope as an important woman writer, re-locating her in the literary history of the nineteenth century as a challenging and impassioned author who was unafraid to court controversy in her writing. Exposing the extent to which Trollope stepped outside the gendered boundaries imposed by nineteenth-century society allows us to make a more accurate assessment of the significance of her place in the literary canon, and to re-establish her as a champion of feminist issues who argued for the rights of unmarried mothers, opposed slavery and the exploitation of child labour, and supported the emancipation of women, including their right to vote and to stand for parliament, the church and the legal profession. It is a strong catalogue of female achievement and a measure of Trollope’s determination to make her voice heard.

This book builds on the work done by academics over the last twenty years or so, continuing the argument for re-assessing Trollope as a key female writer of the nineteenth century and outlining her importance as a pioneering and challenging writer on a wide range of social issues. The study is undertaken in a feminist context, examining Trollope’s writing in the historical, cultural, and social environment of the nineteenth century, and analysing the part gender played in contemporary critical reactions to her texts, in the portrayal of her fictional female characters and in her account of hegemonies of class and cultural constructs, principally those around marriage and the family. Trollope is of particular interest in this context because her life and writing career spanned the Regency and Victorian periods. As contemporary feminist critics such as Brenda Ayres, Helen Heineman, Elsie B. Michie, and Tamara S. Wagner have argued, she was an extraordinarily inventive and fluid writer, both creating and remoulding established fictional tropes. The portfolio of her work provides an important transitional marker for consideration of the emergence of the social and cultural anxieties of the Victorian period, and it is of particular interest in this context to note the gendered reactions that Trollope attracted both during her lifetime and subsequently. All of the recent critical work that has been done on Trollope in an attempt to rehabilitate her as a key woman writer has been carried out by female academics, but as Tamara S. Wagner notes, Despite increasing attempts to dismantle this stereotype, Trollope’s efforts to write for money still tend to be peripatetically evoked in accounts of her son’s struggles (2013: 3). This approach has diminished Trollope as a female writer, failed to recognise the scope and depth of her literary achievements, and confined her to a primary role as a mother.

The sequence of the chapters that follow, offers an exploration of Trollope’s writing based thematically around what emerge as key concerns across the whole of her writing career. Given the astounding breadth and number of volumes she produced, it does not aim to offer a comprehensive analysis of her work but to provide an overview that is historically located and interrogates the ways in which she challenged cultural and literary convention and actively engaged with contemporary literary developments.

Chapter 1 examines Trollope’s portrayal of marriage in four of her texts, the three Widow Barnaby novels published between 1839 and 1843 and One Fault (1840). The Widow Barnaby novels were the most enduringly popular of Trollope’s novels, referred to in several of her obituaries.² They were also an innovation in being the first series of novels focusing on the same character. One Fault offers a complete contrast in that it is the first novel about coercive control within marriage and contains elements of sensation fiction well ahead of the accepted development of the genre in the mid-1860s. I have selected the Widow Barnaby novels not just for the richness of the texts, but because they are available in a uniform scholarly edition from Pickering and Chatto. This edition offers an exemplar of the way in which Trollope’s works can be re-habilitated and made widely available as part of a critical and scholarly re-evaluation of her writing. One Fault is the antithesis of the Widow Barnaby novels. No scholarly edition exists of this powerful and disturbing portrait of coercive control within marriage – indeed, it is hard to obtain a copy other than from academic libraries or through online sources such as the Hathi Trust. This chapter examines the extent to which Trollope challenged conventional views of marriage in her writing, focusing on issues of power, and culturally accepted gendered roles within the family.

Family was of fundamental importance to Trollope. Chapter 2 continues the exploration of marriage by examining the portrayal of young women in three of Trollope’s novels, Tremordyn Cliff (1835), The Attractive Man (1846) and Michael Armstrong (1840), analysing the importance of maternal care and female education as preparation for life and marriage. The group of novels selected illustrate the longevity of Trollope’s interest in this theme and the contrasting and creative ways in which she incorporated these concerns into a wide range of her fiction. Tremordyn Cliff and The Attractive Man are relatively unknown and much of the critical focus on Michael Armstrong has been on the social problem aspects of the text, rather than on the troubling and potentially transgressive resolution of the narrative.

Trollope’s views on politics and religion changed as a result of her life experiences. She lived through a turbulent era politically and her early views and associates were radical. Her experiences in America, however, shifted her political views to the right, and she returned to England very much a conservative. Nevertheless, she wrote passionately about issues of social reform and remained sympathetic to the cause of Italian independence. Her religious beliefs were formed during the reign of George III when evangelicalism and dissent were considered vulgar. Chapter 3 examines three of Trollope’s social reform novels: The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836), The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong (1840) and Jessie Phillips (1843), as well as her anti-evangelical novel, The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837) focusing on her presentation of aspects of gendered power. All these novels played a pivotal role in social reform debates of the period and are also available in scholarly editions from Pickering and Chatto.

Trollope considered herself to be a travel writer rather than a novelist, and as Pamela Neville-Sington notes, she could command a higher price for her travel books than for her fiction (1998, 238). Chapter 4 moves away from fiction to explore this important aspect of her work, focusing on her best-known and first-published work, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). Travel writing met Trollope’s insatiable need for social, cultural and emotional stimulation, as well as being a more respectable form of publication, although attitudes towards fiction were changing. However, travelling to collect material for her books was expensive, and at times dangerous, both because of the political situation in Europe at the time, and because of Trollope’s indefatigable sense of adventure. This chapter provides an overview of travel in the early part of the nineteenth century, including an account of travel writing by other women in the period. It examines the critical reception of Trollope’s travel books, analysing how far these differed, or were similar to, other guide books. In particular, it considers how far Trollope’s account of her travels is a gendered one, limited or freed by the fact that she is a woman writing about other cultures.

The gendered social judgements made about Trollope in her lifetime also had an impact on the assessment of her writing as critics transmitted their gendered evaluation of her personal appearance to attacks on her published works. The conclusion summarizes Trollope’s literary achievements, reclaiming her as an important woman writer with a clear feminist agenda.

A biological and literary mother

Trollope was both a biological and a literary mother. Contemporary reviews of the autobiographies of her sons and of her daughter-in-law’s memoir acknowledged, and indeed applauded, her maternal commitment. She was a brave mother ("Autobiography of Anthony Trollope [Review], 1883: 581) who worked not so much for name and fame as that her children might have bread (Sayle, 1887: 172). The gendered assessment of Trollope, privileging her domestic role over her literary achievements had the additional narrative comfort of its masculine opposite: her pompous and cross-grained husband who gutter[ed] away his patrimony in insane speculations (Francis Trollope: Her Books", 1895: 842). The critical appraisal of her writing and its literary merit was limited, on the whole, to a grudging approval of Domestic Manners of the Americans and the Widow Barnaby novels. She had a fluent pen and a sense of humour (842) and capitalized on these to maximum popular effect: The conditions under which she laboured were … such as rendered artistic work impossible. She wrote not for the love of writing, but for the support of her family, and verily she had her reward (842). This reductive and gendered assessment of Trollope as a female author has its foundations in the cultural double standard that sought to confine women to a domestic role, and to value marriage and motherhood as the paramount valorization of femininity. Frances Eleanor Trollope, Fanny’s daughter-in-law, who wrote the first biography of her, attempted to turn this gendered criticism around and to make it a virtue:

The advocates for an equal treatment of the sexes in Art – those who demand for women’s work a fair field and no favour – could certainly not have complained that