Born Frances Milton at Heckfield vicarage, Hants; in 1809 married Thomas Anthony Trollope, barrister and fellow of New College. In 1827, her husband having fallen into the direst embarrassment, she went out to Cincinnati, and during a residence in the United States amassed the materials of her “Domestic Manners of the Americans” (1832), much resented by Americans. Left a widow in 1835, she settled in Florence. She wrote industriously novels of society and impressions of travel. Of her novels the most successful was, perhaps, “The Widow Barnaby” (1839), with its sequel, “The Widow Married” (1840). Her works (115 vols.) deserved their popularity, but are well-nigh forgotten.

Personal

  With her politics were always an affair of the heart, as, indeed, were all her convictions. Of reasoning from causes, I think that she knew nothing. Her heart was in every way so perfect, her desire to do good to all around her so thorough, and her power of self-sacrifice so complete, that she generally got herself right in spite of her want of logic; but it must be acknowledged that she was emotional. I can remember now her books, and I can see her at her pursuits. The poets she loved best were Dante and Spenser. But she raved also of him of whom all such ladies were raving then, and rejoiced in the popularity and wept over the persecution of Lord Byron. She was among those who seized with avidity on the novels as they came out, of the then unknown Scott, and who could still talk of the triumphs of Miss Edgeworth. With the literature of the day she was familiar, and with the poets of the past. Of other reading I do not think she had mastered much. Her life, I take it, though latterly clouded by many troubles, was easy, luxurious, and idle, till my father’s affairs and her own aspirations sent her to America. She had dear friends among literary people, of whom I remember Mathias, Henry Milman, and Miss Landon; but till long after middle life she never herself wrote a line for publication…. She continued writing up to 1856, when she was seventy-six years old, and had at that time produced one hundred and fourteen volumes, of which the first was not written till she was fifty. Her career offers great encouragement to those who have not begun early in life, but are still ambitious to do something before they depart hence. She was an unselfish, affectionate, and most industrious woman, with great capacity for enjoyment, and high physical gifts. She was endowed, too, with much creative power, with considerable humor, and a genuine feeling for romance. But she was neither clear-sighted nor accurate; and in her attempts to describe morals, manners, and even facts, was unable to avoid the pitfalls of exaggeration.

  Her mind was one of the most extraordinary constituted in regard to recuperative power and the capacity of throwing off sorrow that I ever knew or read of. Any one who did not know her, as her own son knew her, might have supposed that she was deficient in sensibility. No judgment could be more mistaken. She felt acutely, vehemently. But she seemed to throw off sorrow as, to use the vulgar phrase, a duck’s back throws off water, because the nature of the organism will not suffer it to rest there. How often have I applied to her the words of David under a similar affliction!

  What an iron frame this woman must have had; what an indomitable will, and, better than all, what a tender and loving heart; her sympathies extend even beyond her own children, for we find her gentle care and solicitude bestowed upon others also…. Frances Trollope never possessed sufficient leisure for the production of perfect work, and so, perhaps, cannot be classed among our great writers. She was something, however, more admirable, more worthy of love and praise—she was, in the highest sense, a good woman.

Domestic Manners of the Americans, 1832

  This is exactly the title-page we have long wished to see, and we rejoice to say that, now the subject has been taken up, it is handled by an English lady of sense and acuteness, who possesses very considerable power of expression, and enjoyed unusually favourable opportunities for observation.

  Her observations on society appear to have been confined to what she saw in the stage-coaches, steamboats, and taverns. What insight this would give her into domestic manners need not be said.

  Mrs. Trollope’s stories might, for the most part, suit manners nearer home just as well as they do those of Tennessee.

  If she had been an ordinary discontented tourist, her adventures in America would not be worth the trouble of discussing; but her slanderous book made such exposures necessary.

  “The Domestic Manners of the Americans” was the first of a series of books of travels, of which it was probably the best, and was certainly the best known. It will not be too much to say of it that it had a material effect upon the manners of the Americans of the day, and that that effect has been fully appreciated by them. No observer was certainly ever less qualified to judge of the prospects or even of the happiness of a young people. No one could have been worse adapted by nature for the task of learning whether a nation was in a way to thrive. Whatever she saw she judged, as most women do, from her own standing-point. If a thing were ugly to her eyes, it ought to be ugly to all eyes—and if ugly, it must be bad. What though people had plenty to eat and clothes to wear, if they put their feet upon the tables and did not reverence their betters? The Americans were to her rough, uncouth, and vulgar—and she told them so. Those communistic and social ideas, which had been so pretty in a drawing-room, were scattered to the winds. Her volumes were very bitter; but they were very clever, and they saved the family from ruin.

  Of all books of travel that have appeared during the twelve-month, this sixty-year-old classic ought to be read with the greatest avidity by Americans, for it is history in its most taking form. The style is that of a bright, cultivated Englishwoman, with a “conscious incapacity for description,” but with a very unusual capacity for it, nevertheless. She writes not from memory but from notes made on the spot, and with a manifest desire to be moderate and truthful.

  Although her criticisms and assertions were engendered in disappointment, national animosity, and revenge, they were essentially true, and however chagrined we were, we acknowledged them as such by essaying to correct our manners; as was afterward universally demonstrated whenever one in public fell within the range of her criticisms as the cry of “Trollope! Trollope! Trollope!” was immediately vociferated…. It gave pleasure to the English, but profit to us, however much we may have been annoyed by it at first.

  The authoress’s opportunities for producing a valuable book were considerable. She had spent four years in the country, travelled in nearly every part of it, associated with all classes, and unremittingly exercised a keen faculty for observation. If it notwithstanding fails to offer a completely authentic view of American manners, the reason is no want of candour or any invincible prejudice, but the tendency, equally visible in her novels, to dwell upon the more broadly humorous, and consequently the more vulgar, aspects of things. Mrs. Trollope was personally entirely exempt from vulgarity, but she knew her forte to lie in depicting it. Americans might therefore justly complain that her view of their country conveyed a misleading impression as a whole, while there is no ground for questioning the fidelity of individual traits, or for assuming the authoress’s pen to have been guided by dislike of democratic institutions. Much of the ill will excited by the book was occasioned by the freedom of her strictures on slavery, which Americans outside New England were then nearly as unanimous in upholding as they are now in denouncing.

General

  I have been reading Bulwer’s novels and Mrs. Trollope’s libels, and Dr. Parr’s works. I am sure you are not an admirer of Mrs. Trollope’s. She has neither the delicacy nor the candour which constitute true nobility of mind, and her extent of talent forms but a scanty veil to shadow her other defects.

  Speaking of travellers, I have amused myself with looking over Mrs. Trollope’s “Paris.” She is certainly clever at observing the surface, but, like other superficial book-makers, leaves you about as wise as she found you. You see through the whole that she is plotting future visits to Paris, and means to be well received. The tone of fearless truth, which cares not for giving offence, is singularly wanting. I was quite amused with her Toryism. It aims to be authoritative and dignified, but cannot rise above scolding.

  The class to which she belongs is, fortunately, very small; but it will always be recruited from the ranks of the unscrupulous, so long as a corrupt taste is likely to yield a trifling profit. She owes everything to that audacious contempt of public opinion, which is the distinguishing mark of persons who are said to stick at nothing. Nothing but this sticking at nothing could have produced some of the books she has written, in which her wonderful impunity of face is so remarkable. Her constitutional coarseness is the natural element of a low popularity, and is sure to pass for cleverness, shrewdness, and strength, where cultivated judgment and chaste inspiration would be thrown away. Her books of travel are crowded with plebeian criticisms on works of art and the usages of courts, and are doubtless held in great esteem by her admirers, who love to see such things overhauled and dragged down to their own level. The book on America is of a different class. The subject exactly suited her style and her taste, and people looked on at the fun as they would at a scramble of sweeps in the kennel; while the reflecting few thought it a little unfair in Mrs. Trollope to find fault with the manners of the Americans. Happily for her she had such a topic to begin with. Had she commenced her literary career with Austria or France, in all likelihood she would have ended it there…. We have heard it argued on the behalf of Mrs. Trollope, that her novels are, at all events, drawn from life. So are sign-paintings. It is no great proof of their truth that centaurs and griffins do not run loose through her pages, and that her men and women have neither hoofs nor tails. The tawdriest wax-works, girt up in paste and spangles are also “drawn from life;” but there ends the resemblance.

  A tendency to artificial sentiment was certainly not the fault of Mrs. Frances Trollope as a novelist. There was a practical heartiness in her work that gave pleasure to the readers of her own generation, and her name lives for the next generation of readers also in two sons who maintain its credit.

  That Mrs. Trollope had no sympathy with the Romantic school will not excite surprise. Lamennais and Victor Hugo she stigmatizes as décousus of the worst kind, and places them in the same rank as Robespierre. The genius of Victor Hugo, so vast, so elevated, and so profound, she could not understand; she could see only its irregularities, like a certain “æsthete” who, when contemplating the water-floods of Niagara, directed his attention to a supposed defect in their curve!… In truth, she is seldom happy in her literary criticisms. She speaks of Béranger as “a meteor.”… We have hinted that Mrs. Trollope’s strength lay in her faculty of observation, and her strong, pungent humour. Occasionally, however, she ventures on a vein of reflection, and not without success.

  She wrote a great deal at this period, and survived till 1863; but her work hardly survived as long as she did. It has, however, been said, and not without justice, that much of the more vivid if coarser substance of her younger son’s humour is to be traced in it.

  Mrs. Trollope’s success in a particular department of her art has been injurious to her general reputation. She lives by the vigour of her portraits of vulgar persons, and her readers cannot help associating her with the characters she makes so entirely her own…. She writes not only like a woman of sense, but like a woman of feeling. Though shrewd and observant, she could hardly be termed intellectual, nor was she warmly sympathetic with what is highest in literature, art, and life. But she was richly provided with solid and useful virtues—“honest, courageous, industrious, generous, and affectionate,” as her character is summed up by her daughter-in-law. As a writer, the most remarkable circumstance in her career is perhaps the late period at which she began to write. It can but seldom have happened that an author destined to prolonged productiveness and some celebrity should have published nothing until fifty-two.