Domestic Manners of the Americans

Frances Trollope, the mother of the prolific mid-Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, was an accomplished novelist and travel writer in her own right. In all, she was the author of 35 novels, many of them quite popular. Born the second daughter of a vicar, she was raised in the town of Bristol. In 1809 she married Thomas Trollope, a promising young barrister. Although Thomas had a profitable legal practice, a number of pecuniary crises strained the Trollopes financially. In 1827, partly in an attempt to escape her husband's sullenness over their money matters and partly to help rebuild the family's fortune, she took three of her six children to the United States, where she remained until 1830. There (in Cincinnati) she set up a retail store that was to provide this region of provincial America with European culture. When the scheme failed, Trollope turned to writing as a means of self-preservation. The result was Domestic Manners of the Americans, which was immensely popular, and The Refugee in America, her first novel, both published in 1832. Soon after she established a professional relationship with the publisher Richard Bentley, who went far to publicize her work. The finances of the family did not improve, however, and in 1835, finally bankrupt, the Trollopes moved to Belgium, where Thomas died. Frances's agreement with Bentley, who paid her $7600 per novel, and her remarkable output of two novels per year restored the family fortunes. During her life Trollope's fiction was considered rough and inelegant, and she was not a favorite of the critics. In recent years her work has begun to attract considerable attention for its insightful political and social analysis and its strong stand on issues of the day.