[In the following essay, Chaloner examines the manner in which Frances Trollope researched her novel about child labor and cautions against regarding fictional representations of social problems as historically accurate.]

Mrs. Frances Trollope, the mother of Anthony Trollope the novelist, is not generally associated with the North of England and its cotton industry, although her now rather rare novel, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, which appeared in twelve shilling parts during 1839-40,¹ purports to be an exposure of the worst horrors of the Industrial Revolution in the expanding textile districts. The illustrations to the book, engravings by Auguste Hervieu, R. W. Buss, and Thomas Onwhyn,² have considerable period charm, being sometimes sentimental and sometimes horrific, in the early Victorian manner.

Mrs. Trollope's first book, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832),³ published when she was over fifty years of age, was based on her unfortunate experiences in the U.S.A. of the late 1820's. She arrived in Cincinnati during 1828 with the plan of establishing her son Henry in business as the proprietor of a grandiose department store, a project which failed miserably and forced her return to England in 1831. Domestic Manners of the Americans showed that she had a genius for depicting vulgar people, and proved an immediate best-seller. Readers and critics in the U.S.A. were furious at her indictment of American society, but the powerful anti-American and conservative elements in Britain and Western European society rejoiced. The new literary lioness followed this unexpected good fortune with a forced stream of novels and travel books, for she was a liberal spender as well as an industrious writer, having a large family and an unpractical, ailing husband to support.⁴

By the late 1830's, in her search for fresh and profitable subjects, Mrs. Trollope discovered the agitation for further factory legislation which was then proceeding in Britain. She therefore determined, in her own words, “to drag into the light of day, and place before the eyes of Englishmen, the hideous mass of injustice and suffering to which thousands of infant labourers are subjected, who toil in our monster spinning-mills” (Michael Armstrong, p. iii). Her well-attested affection for children and her general humanitarian outlook coincided happily with her interests as a professional novelist.⁵ It should be remembered that a Factory Act, which regulated the employment of children and young persons in textile mills, had been passed in 1833. The increasingly effective administration of the provisions of this act by paid inspectors was stamping out the worst abuses in the factories before Mrs. Trollope took any interest in the subject. But by 1836 the supporters of the Short Time movement in the manufacturing towns of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and the Midlands, inflamed by the speeches of demagogues such as the Rev. Joseph Rayner Stephens of Ashton-under-Lyne and Richard Oastler of Yorkshire, “the King of the factory children,” were pressing for the ten-hour day.⁶ Lord Ashley, however, the recognised leader of the movement in the House of Commons, counselled caution. Agitation and discussion continued spasmodically throughout 1838 and 1839, when abortive factory bills were before Parliament. The question of factory reform, in its manifold aspects and with its powerful humanitarian appeal, seemed to Mrs. Trollope an excellent basis for another best-seller. Michael Armstrong, therefore, forms part of that general reaction against novels about high life (“the silver fork school”) which was in train by 1839, partly as a result of Carlyle's influence.⁷

Mrs. Trollope went about the collection of background material with characteristic efficiency. From Lord Ashley she obtained a sheaf of introductions to “a rather strange assortment of persons,”⁸ and set off incognita on 20 February 1839 “by the mail train” from London to Manchester on the recently opened railway, accompanied by her eldest son, Thomas Adolphus.⁹ He proved “useful to her in searching for and collecting facts in some places where it would have been difficult for her to look for them,” and after her death he claimed, by implication, joint authorship of Michael Armstrong with his mother (T. A. Trollope, pp. 8-9). The first instalment (in which there was little that needed first hand experience of the North) was already on its way from the publisher to the bookshops by the time Mrs. Trollope arrived in the North of England. The Northern Star of Leeds, Feargus O'Connor's Chartist newspaper, noted approvingly in its issue for Saturday, 2 March 1839:

This lady is taking the right way to write the truth about “The Factory Boy.” She has been spending some time in the neighbourhood of Manchester, making her own observations upon the real state in which “The Factory Boy” exists. She is determined not to have her judgement warped, but to see all the sides of his case for herself. … She has introductions to the rich and to the poor; and she seems determined to avail herself of these opportunities of making herself mistress of the whole question pro and con. We may differ from the lady on many points; but we cordially award to her the meed of our praise for the pains she is now taking thoroughly to understand the case of the poor wretch whom she has chosen as the hero of her next romance.

(p. 4)

In Bradford the Trollopes met John Wood, a philanthropic worsted spinner, whose firm employed three thousand hands (T. A. Trollope, pp. 8-9, 11). Wood and his partner, William Walker, were strong supporters of the ten-hours agitation. At Wood's residence they were also introduced to another local champion of the factory children, the Rev. G. S. Bull, the Anglican incumbent of Bierley, who appears in Michael Armstrong under the thin disguise of “Parson Bell of Fairly” in Yorkshire.¹⁰ In Manchester itself they met the pioneer trade-unionist John Doherty,¹¹ by then evening a living as “a small bookseller, of Hyde's Cross.” T. A. Trollope described him as “an Irishman, a Roman Catholic, and a furious Radical, but a very clever man” (T. A. Trollope, p. 10). With much difficulty he persuaded Doherty to dine with Mrs. Trollope, but while at table Doherty's excitement was “so great and continuous that he could eat next to nothing.” But of all their informants Richard Oastler, “the Danton of the movement,” made the greatest impression (T. A. Trollope, p. 10). The rabble-rousing Stephens, whom they heard preaching in his chapel at Stalybridge on Sunday, 24 February,¹² on the text of “the cruel and relentless march of the great Juggernauth, Gold,” did not completely justify his great reputation.¹³

The effects of these experiences can easily be traced in Michael Armstrong. The tale centres around the imaginary Lancashire factory town of Ashleigh, and the narrative reflects the conditions of the 1820's. From the description given of it, Ashleigh appears to have been situated somewhere in the Ashton-Stalybridge-Stockport area.¹⁴ The villain of the novel is a coarse, preposterous monster, Sir Matthew Dowling, “the proprietor of many cotton-mills.” He is fabulously wealthy: “throughout the whole line of that Golconda country, which, being the busiest of the manufacturing districts, is probably the richest in the world, there was not anyone who could vie in wealth with him” (Michael Armstrong, p. 2). Naturally he opposes factory legislation, fears strikes, overworks his miserable operatives, and is worried about trade unionist activities at “The Weavers' Arms” public house. Oddly enough, by a curious transposition, the description of Dowling's appearance and physique tallies very closely with that of Oastler as given by T. A. Trollope (pp. 12-13).

Sir Matthew is trapped by his social ambitions into adopting a miserable ten-year-old factory boy, Michael Armstrong, from his Brookford spinning mill. But Michael spends only a short time as a member of the numerous family at Dowling Lodge. Sir Matthew soon becomes embarrassed by the presence of “the factory brat,” and apprentices him for a period of eleven years' servitude to his friend Elgood Sharpton, Esq., of Thistledown House, Derbyshire. Sharpton owns the grim and dreadful Deep Valley Mill on Ridge-top Moor in the same county, an establishment so secluded that it was “hardly possible to conceive a spot more effectually hidden from the eyes of all men” (Michael Armstrong, p. 180). In the dismal Deep Valley apprentice-house “hundreds of little aching hearts” (p. 181) languish, often competing with the pigs for swill, sometimes trying to escape, and dying off in dozens from fever. It is here that the influence of Doherty becomes apparent. In 1832 Doherty had reprinted as a pamphlet John Brown's celebrated Memoir of Robert Blincoe, originally published in 1828, which described the sufferings of a pauper apprentice, first in a cotton-mill at Lowdham near Nottingham, and then at Litton Mill, near Tideswell in Derbyshire.¹⁵ This second mill was owned by Ellice Needham (i.e. “Elgood Sharpton”) of Highgate Wall, near Buxton in Derbyshire. As described by Blincoe, the setting of Litton Mill, “at the bottom of a sequestered glen, and surrounded by rugged rocks, remote from any human habitation,”¹⁶ answers completely to that of Deep Valley Mill, and indeed, Mrs. Trollope explained in a footnote: “The real name of this valley (which most assuredly is no creation of romance) is not given lest an action for libel should be the consequence. The scenes which have passed there and which the following pages will describe, have been stated on authority not to be impeached” (p. 180). T. A. Trollope's statement about the novel, “What we are there described to have seen, we saw” (p. 9), seems to be, to say the least, exaggerated.

The secret of how Michael Armstrong succeeded in escaping from the clutches of Elgood Sharpton to take part in the famous York meeting of factory reformers on Easter Monday, 24 April 1832,¹⁷ and of the surprising sequel to the adoption of his brother Edward by a young, beautiful, but orphaned cotton heiress, Miss Brotherton, must be left to those who wish to browse in the diffuse jungle of this early Victorian novel. Mrs. Trollope's publisher, Henry Colburn, paid a “long price” for Michael Armstrong, and did not complain, so that it presumably sold well. But it was not one of the more popular of her novels, and, as T. A. Trollope remarked: “Novel readers are exceedingly quick to smell the rhubarb under the jam in the dose offered to them” (pp. 7-8). A hostile reviewer in the Statesman saw in the repeal of the Corn Laws the cure both for the social degradation of the workers and the economic difficulties of the millowners:

Whatever be the literary merits of Michael Armstrong (and we confess we see none, it is one of the dullest and heaviest productions we have ever been doomed to read) it should at once be consigned to oblivion as an exaggerated statement of the vices of a class, and a mischievous attempt to excite the worst and bitterest feelings against men, who are, like other men, creatures of circumstances, in which their lot has been cast … we can see no more utility in a gross exaggeration or invidious exposure of the faults of these, than in the coarse and violent abuse oftentime passed out upon the landowners. Both parties are for the most part the victims of their own ignorance; and the first and most pernicious fruit of that ignorance is the corn laws … Their repeal is the most effectual step to that protection [of “infant labourers against sensualised parents and unthinking masters”]. It would make land cheaper, wages better, healthier cottages and gardens more attainable and the necessity for parents sending their children to work less irksome. Until this be done, the landowners are quite as blameable as the manufacturers for the wrongs done in the “monster spinning mills.” But we abominate abuse of the landowner as we do the counsel of the “torch and dagger”; we think the author of Michael Armstrong deserves as richly to have eighteen months in Chester Gaol as any that are there now for using violent language against the “monster cotton mills.”¹⁸

As an account of factory conditions in general Michael Armstrong cannot be said to justify the praise given to it by some historians.¹⁹ The Statesman was not alone in its hostile criticism, and towards the end of 1839 Frederic Montagu published a counterblast in the form of a novel with the striking title of Mary Ashley, the Factory Girl, or Facts upon Factories. Michael Armstrong, however, found high favour among the members of the Chartist movement, which enjoyed its period of greatest influence and violence in 1839-40. Mrs. Trollope wrote in a private letter shortly after its publication: “between ourselves, I don't think any one cares much for ‘Michael Armstrong’—except the Chartists. A new kind of patrons for me!” (F. E. Trollope, p. 301). In public the Tory-minded authoress was quick to disown her new supporters, for she wrote in the preface to the collected parts:

it is grievous to see misguided and unfortunate men pursuing a course which must necessarily neutralize the efforts of their true friends. When those in whose behalf she hoped to move the sympathy of their country are found busy in scenes of outrage and lawless violence, and uniting themselves with individuals whose doctrines are subversive of every species of social order, the author feels that it would be alike acting in violation of her own principles, and doing injury to the cause she wishes to serve, were she to persist in an attempt to hold up as objects of public sympathy, men who have stained their righteous cause with deeds of violence and blood.

(pp. iii-iv)

It is a tribute to Mrs. Trollope's feelings that the mediocre literary success of Michael Armstrong did not prevent her from publishing in 1842-43 Jessie Phillips: a Tale of the Present Day on the theme of the harshness with which the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was administered in some parts of the country.

One of the illustrations in Michael Armstrong had a curious later history. It purports to show a scene during a tour of Dowling's Brookford Mill, when the sleek, well-dressed and adopted Michael Armstrong greets his younger brother Edward, who is still at work as a child labourer. In 1853 or 1854 this touching scene was redrawn to serve as the frontispiece of John C. Cobden's muckraking work, The White Slaves of England, Compiled from Official Documents.²⁰ Cobden directed his attack mainly against the “feudal” British aristocracy, but industrialists also came in for strong criticism on account of their “treatment of the laboring classes in the factories and coal mines of Great Britain.” Some of his phrases have a familiar ring: “The poor [in Britain] are every year becoming poorer, and more dependent upon those who feast upon their sufferings; while the power and wealth of the realm are annually concentrating in fewer hands, and becoming more and more instruments of oppression” (p. 6). The author quoted Mrs. Trollope's Michael Armstrong and Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist approvingly as evidence of English social conditions, and expressed his indebtedness “to the publications of distinguished democrats of England, who have keenly felt the evils under which their country groans” (p. 7).

The late Humphry House, in The Dickens World (Oxford, 1941), warned against the temptation to make uncritical use of Charles Dickens' novels as sources for the social and economic history of his times.²¹ It is suggested that this caution has a wider application. While the careful examination of fictional incidents based on the social and economic life of a writer's age will undoubtedly throw light on that author's mind and working methods, it can never be a substitute for a study of the original historical sources themselves.

Notes

1. Published by Henry Colburn, Great Marlborough Street, London, pp. viii + 387. The first part appeared on 26 Feb. 1839 (Northern Star, 2 Mar. 1839, p. 1).

2. Onwhyn (d. 1886) executed “illegitimate” illustrations to Dickens' works in 1837-38 (DNB [Dictionary of National Biography]).

3. There is an excellent edition of Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. Donald Smalley (New York, 1949).

4. Perhaps the best short analysis of the reasons for Trollope senior's lack of success in life is given by Smalley, pp. xiv-xv, lxii. See also Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, ed. Michael Sadleir (Oxford, 1923), pp. 6-7, 10-14, and Sadleir, Trollope: A Commentary (London, 1933), pp. 70-73.

5. See also Sadleir, pp. 92-94, and L. P. and R. P. Stebbins, The Trollopes (London, 1946), pp. 97-98.

6. For Stephens, see J. T. Ward, “Revolutionary Tory: the Life of Joseph Rayner Stephens of Ashton-under-Lyne (1805-1879)” in Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, LXVIII (1959), 93-116, and for Oastler, Cecil Driver, Tory Radical: the Life of Richard Oastler (New York, 1946).

7. Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen Forties (Oxford, 1954), pp. 73-88.

8. T. A. Trollope, What I Remember (London, 1887), II, 8.

9. F. E. Trollope, Frances Trollope: Her Life and Literary Work from George III to Victoria (London, 1895), I, 300-301; Northern Star, 2 Mar. 1839, p. 4.

10. Michael Armstrong, pp. 198-211, 319-324; see J. C. Gill, The Ten Hours Parson (London, 1959).

11. T. A. Trollope, p. 8. For Doherty's importance in the working-class movements of the time, see Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism, 1666-1920 (London, 1920), pp. 107, 117-118, 121, 124, and G. D. H. Cole, Attempts at General Union: a Study in British Trade Union History, 1818-1834 (London, 1953), passim.

12. Northern Star, 2 Mar. 1839, p. 4.

13. T. A. Trollope, pp. 12-13. During Stephens' service Oastler mounted the pulpit and gave out the verses of a hymn, which the congregation sang after him.

14. There is a description, dating from the early 1840's, of these three cotton towns in Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (Oxford, 1958), pp. 52-53.

15. See A. E. Musson, “Robert Blincoe and the Early Factory System” (Derbyshire Miscellany, I [Feb. 1958], 111-117), which gives the fullest and most reliable account of Blincoe and this pamphlet, and J. D. Chambers, The Vale of Trent, 1670-1800 (Cambridge, 1957), pp. 60-62.

16. John Brown, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe (Manchester, 1832), p. 32.

17. Michael Armstrong, pp. 312-314. For the York meeting, see B. L. Hutchins and Amy Harrison, A History of Factory Legislation (London, 1907), pp. 51-52, and Driver, ch. xiv, “The Pilgrimage to York.”

18. Quoted in the Bolton Free Press of 22 Feb. 1840. I am indebted to Mr. Rhodes Boyson for this reference. The Rev. J. R. Stephens was sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment in Chester Gaol at the Chester Assizes of August 1839 for having used seditious and inflammatory language. The Athenaeum of 10 Aug. 1839 attacked Michael Armstrong bitterly and searchingly on much the same lines while the parts were still being issued.

19. See, for example, J. L. and B. Hammond, Lord Shaftesbury (London, 1936), p. 173; Sadleir, p. 93; F. D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1947), p. 132; Driver, pp. 403-404. For more critical and less sentimental examination of the subject of factory conditions and working-class welfare in early nineteenth-century England, see W. H. Hutt, “The Factory System of the Early Nineteenth Century” in Capitalism and the Historians, ed. F. A. von Hayek (London, 1954), pp. 160-188; N. J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1959); the introduction (pp. xi-xxxi) to Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. Henderson and Chaloner; R. M. Hartwell, “Interpretations of the Industrial Revolution in England, Part I,” Journal of Economic History, XIX (1959), 229-249; and A. J. Taylor, “Progress and Poverty in Britain, 1780-1950: a Reappraisal,” History, XLV (1960), 16-31.

20. Published by Miller, Orton and Mulligan, of Auburn and Buffalo. By 1854 it had reached its second edition and fifth thousand.

21. See, in particular, ch. i, “History” (pp. 18-35) and pp. 92-105 (the Poor Law, with particular reference to Oliver Twist). See also William O. Aydelotte, “The England of Marx and Mill as Reflected in Fiction,” Journal of Economic History, VIII (1948), Supplement, 42-58.