A critical study of the work of Frances Milton Trollope

Abstract

Though Frances Milton Trollope was notorious among her contemporaries as a writer of crudeness and vulgarity today we remember little more about her than her mothering Anthony Trollope and writing a travel book which treated the Americans with little tenderness. In this thesis I examine Mrs. Trollope's work in order to determine the place which belongs to her in early Victorian letters. Her travel books, with the exception of The Domestic Manners of the Americans, show her ready to profit by the vogue for such journalism, but they give no grounds for the shabbiest literary reputation, for they are pretentious and gossiping but no more. The majority of her novels she wrote in an artificial, theatrical fashion which made it possible for her to produce thirty-four novels but made it difficult for her to write in the realistic vein which proved her most congenial. Despite the limits of her theatrical convention, in The Widow Bamaby, Petticoat Government, and a few other of her novels Mrs. Trollope wrote books as good as some of the best minor fiction of her time, books with something of her own buoyancy and an attention to the revelation of character in petty domestic situations. Far less adept than her social comedies, her polemical no show a social concern which, with her attempts at serial publication, make her very much a writer of her time. Her reception was often hostile, largely because Mrs Trollope described meanness and vulgarity better than anything else, but also because she maintained provocative attitudes on political and religious issues. Her contemporary reputation and the greater fame of her son have unduly diminished Mrs. Trollope 's stature: it is time we restore her to a position among the better minor writers of the early Victorian period.