[In the following essay, Button discusses feminist and antislavery themes in Frances Trollope's The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, which she asserts was the first English novel to attack slavery in the United States.]

In spite of recent critical attention which has convincingly demonstrated the breadth of Mrs. Frances Trollope's literary achievement, she remains confined in the contemporary popular imagination as the vitriolic narrator of Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and critic par excellence of nineteenth-century American morals and culture.¹ Her reputation, it seems, has been limited to this focus despite the fact that by her death in 1863 at the age of eighty-four, she had a firmly established international reputation as the able author of thirty-four novels, six travel journals, several verse dramas, and two long narrative poems. Her fiction reflects the degree to which she was committed to major social reforms and suggests a breath of intellect for which she is only occasionally given credit. She was, in the words of one critic, “much read, much admired, and much abused” by the literary establishment of her day though she has become largely unknown to most twentieth-century readers.² Her many important contributions to English literature, particularly in the area of social reform, deserve to be remembered.

Trollope's influence on the Victorian English reading public was accomplished in part because of her choice of subjects. She was motivated at the beginning of her career by crushing financial and personal pressures to write gothic romances and light satire, but anger directed at religious hypocrisy, social injustices (including English factory conditions and American slavery), and the inferior status accorded to women throughout Europe and America soon directed her to the subjects for her best fiction. Mrs. Trollope's fourth novel was the first of several to address pressing social concerns. Based on experiences that Mrs. Trollope had recorded in her American travel journal, The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or, Scenes from the Mississippi (1836)³ attacks the American institution of slavery at the same time that it capitalizes both on Trollope's feminist stance and on her strident anti-American bias. Appearing fifteen years before the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851) and more than six months before Richard Hildreth's fictionalized autobiography entitled The White Slave, or Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836), Trollope's novel was the first work of fiction published in England to address the problem of slavery in the United States. As such, it was part of an important body of antislavery propaganda which reached its peak in England between 1779-1838 and which was in large part responsible for the success of the movement in its various phases.⁴ By addressing the atrocities of American slavery, Trollope broadened her audience and the social impact of her work; by maintaining the author's personal focus on the lives of women, the novel furthered Trollope's vision of the role which women could and should play in American social and cultural life. Because of this blend of feminist and abolitionist concerns in the text, the novel marked both an important development in Trollope's literary career and a significant contribution to the history of the English novel (Heineman 143).

Mrs. Trollope's motives for conceiving a work like Whitlaw were not exclusively the result of high-minded ideals, however. In the period during which Mrs. Trollope developed the idea and drafted her manuscript, she watched both her husband Anthony and daughter Emily die of tuberculosis. The financial burdens incurred during these difficult illnesses were crippling, and they forced Mrs. Trollope to negotiate aggressively with publishers for book contracts. The copyright for Whitlaw was sold on 28 March 1836 to Bentley for £350 in a comprehensive agreement which included three other works in progress. The advance for this work provided the means by which Mrs. Trollope could assist those family members remaining in her care.

Another motive for generating marketable texts came from Mrs. Trollope's penchant for international travel. After writing several travel journals—the genre in which she had first made her name—she was obliged to confess to her publisher that the

publishing of some work of imagination, written in the retirement of my quiet home, in the interval between my costly ramblings, is the only method by which I can enable myself to undertake them.⁵

The shift from travel literature to fiction, then, was largely a practical decision, but the forceful social commentary that had characterized her first and best journal became integrated into this work. Whitlaw draws substantially from The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), Trollope's remarkable account of her difficult sojourn in the United States from 1827 to 1831.

To write this journal, Mrs. Trollope synthesized much of the experience of three years abroad in a desperate attempt to raise money for her family. She had ventured to America from England with three of her five children, two servants, and a young French artist in response to an invitation from Scottish reformer Frances Wright. The immediate purpose of the trip was to provide companionship to her friend and to visit Wright's self-supporting experimental community in Nashoba, Tennessee, where slaves were bought and educated for a life of freedom. Additional incentives for travel included a troubled marriage and the need for a new personal challenge. When Nashoba failed to meet Mrs. Trollope's expectations, however, she left for Cincinnati, where she tried with varying success to engage the American public in a variety of commercial enterprises. Of all her many creative efforts, only her journal, published seven months after her return to England in September 1931, met with unqualified success, an event almost unprecedented for a first work by a previously unpublished author. American audiences were appalled and angry at her caustic remarks in that journal; English audiences, depending on their political sympathies, responded variously. Trollope's manuscript aroused such a storm of controversy that in the first year of its publication, there were four English and four American editions. Domestic Manners of the Americans was translated into four languages and earned the author approximately £600, in spite of the lack of a copyright agreement in America which prevented her from receiving royalties from American editions. The money that Mrs. Trollope received from this publication was enough to pay off many debts and to restore to order the Trollopes' domestic situation.

Though there was a rash of similar travel journals during the decade in which Domestic Manners was published, the style and focus of Trollope's work distinguish it from the travel accounts of other English writers. Her book contains very little analysis of American political institutions, but focuses instead on American domestic life and social behavior as described through personal anecdotes recounted chronologically. Her tone is consistently caustic as she describes ridiculous and often unpleasant aspects of the domestic experience. Furthermore, she is more explicit than any other writer of travel accounts in her distaste for American people: “I do not like them. I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions.”⁶ Finally, whereas other travelers simply remark in passing upon the lack of cultural development in American society, Mrs. Trollope makes this aspect of American life the central thesis of her work. Specifically, she attributes American cultural deficiencies in large part to the minor role played by American women in the social life of the nation. Their lives, she claims, are “shrouded in a seven-fold shield of insignificance” (Domestic Manners 69) and they forfeit many natural opportunities to uplift the nation's moral tone and enrich its culture.

Mrs. Trollope's criticisms extend to almost every aspect of American life, and she is no less appalled at slavery in her journal than her abolitionist novel might suggest. She notes in the journal both the inhumanity of slave-breeding plantations in the South and the laws enacted to preserve the illiteracy and ignorance of slaves, and she decries the lack of legal recourse available to mistreated slaves. Ever appreciative of her own domestic help, however, Trollope seemed to acknowledge the value of domestic slaves; she concedes that their treatment was tolerable and that their immediate and total emancipation was fraught with complications. At the same time, she recognizes the utter hypocrisy of having slavery in a country which so prided itself on the concept of freedom (See Domestic Manners 186, 317, 245-47.) These issues described in her journal were those around which she constructed her antislavery fiction.

The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw was written while the memory of the South was still fresh in her mind. It is a story on the grand scale of Southern plantation life which portrays all of the complex interracial dynamics of the slave system: slaves are abused by white masters, quadroons are loved and deserted, and abolitionists risk their lives in the cause. The title figure, Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, is a slave overseer whose first name recalls the character of Brother Jonathan, used by British cartoonists at the time to personify America.⁷ As such, he repeats the stereotype of the arrogant, naive country rustic. His middle and last names, by a rather explicit irony, suggest perversion and corruption. Jefferson, renowned statesman and reputed father of numerous slave children, emphasizes the inherent contradiction between principle and practice in America at the time which Trollope had noted in her journal. Whitlaw is also “white-law,” a transplanted Yankee and bigot whose family has migrated south on the Mississippi River, through Natchez, Tennessee, to New Orleans. There, by means of cunning and some hard work, Jonathan becomes the proud owner of a large Southern plantation and the cruel overseer of numerous slaves. Although the narrative follows the fortunes of this depraved individual, Trollope develops around him a complex community of slaves and landowners, Europeans and Americans, men and women, many of whom could be considered stock features of abolition literature.

In her creation of character and plot, Trollope was probably influenced by several of the slave narratives available in England at this time.⁸ In turn, as one of England's first antislavery novels, Whitlaw may have helped to establish a cast of characters and themes which later became stock features of the abolitionist novel: the tragic mulatto, the harassed female slave and her cruel overseer, passionate slave lovers, the wise and abused elderly slave woman, and daring abolitionists. Trollope's focus on the lives of women within the slave system, however, was unique in English abolitionist fiction and consistent with the feminist orientation of her work.

Trollope addresses the inferior status of white women in American society early in the novel in the portrayal of Whitlaw's mother and Aunt Clio, whose values have been misshapen by the cult of domesticity and its attendant evils. Legally responsible for raising her nephew, Aunt Clio is so devoted to Whitlaw's future success as a statesman that she refuses to acknowledge his depravity and allows herself to be ruled by him both economically and psychologically. From her earliest days on the Mississippi, she and Whitlaw's mother show evidence of economic oppression and are entirely unable to combat the prevailing American male attitude which relegated women to a position of intellectual and social inferiority—and men to the status of arrogant but competent family “heads”:

Their garments were scanty and sordid, and they had much of the look and air of that poorly-paid class known in every manufacturing town in the United States as “the gals of the factory.” Whatever else they might be, however, they seemed to possess one excellent feminine quality in perfection—they were most “obedient to command.”⁹

Clio's blinding devotion to her nephew is such that she obscures and distorts facts in order to please him, and she

would willingly at any time have crept into the coalhole, and remained there patiently till he bade her come out again, could she have spared him a feeling of mortification thereby and that without even thinking it possible that the moral nature of the request might be defective.

(Whitlaw II:42)

It is not until Clio becomes personally involved in the lives of local women friends that she is able to recognize a social responsibility greater than that of protecting her nephew: to take care of herself and to act in defense of those oppressed by slavery. This she is able to do best after her nephew dies and she is possessed of a large fortune. Though Whitlaw ends before Clio's new life begins, she appears briefly in Trollope's fourteenth novel, The Barnabys in America; or, Adventures of the Widow Wedded (1843), as an independent matron, a kind overseer to her slaves, and a financial and emotional encouragement to her friends. Clio's willingness to develop interracial friendships with other women reflects Trollope's feminist orientation as well as her unwitting prefiguring of thematic patterns in the African-American novel.¹⁰

Trollope's focus on the abuse of women continues in her treatment of female slaves and their descendants who, she believes, suffer most because of this institution. Her portrayal of indignities peculiarly brutal to female slaves, such as sexual abuse and separation from family, is offered in some detail and follows the general pattern found in slave narratives. Her description of the inherent dignity of female slaves and of their resourcefulness in evading the master's sexual advances is also emphasized. The young slave heroine Phoebe, for example, experiences her moment of greatest personal triumph when she realizes that she has the power to choose whether or not to submit to Whitlaw's advances. When she opts for a lashing, she is miraculously rescued by an older slave woman. Such apparent manipulation of plot is effective in establishing Mrs. Trollope's ideological sympathies, though it tends to weaken the credibility of her tale.

Mrs. Trollope concentrates her portrayal of the female slave experience in a toughened matriarch who has survived her long life of hard labor and personal abuse:

This wretched relic of a life of labour and woe had been on the plantation longer than its owner or any of his numerous dependents could remember. … [Y]et it was recorded of her that she had borne more children and performed more extraordinary tasks than any other slave was ever before believed to have done. … [S]he was considered by her master and all his myrmidons as a sort of privileged personage, neither expected to perform any sort of labor—of which indeed she appeared perfectly incapable—nor to answer at any of the musters, not to be challenged for any of her wanderings or wild freaks whatever.

(Whitlaw I:221)

Called Juno by all who know her, she is thought by some to be mad, by others to be in touch with some source of mystical power.¹¹ At the very least, because of great personal misfortune, she borders on an insanity which provides her the only escape from the misery in which she lives. Bought by a wealthy white slave-holding family, she had become mistress to a series of male overseers by whom she had had many children, and by whom she had been deserted. The last owner

departed for Europe, taking with him a little yellow girl of eighteen months old, on whom he determined to bestow an education which should atone by its expense for the cruelty he considered obliged to practice by abandoning her mother.

(Withlaw II:5)

Though Mrs. Trollope focuses in such passages on the abuse of female slaves like Juno, she cannot refrain from allowing other aspects of her anti-American bias to shape her narrative. The decision of the father of Juno's child, for example, clearly reflects not only the physical and emotional abuses heaped on female slaves by their owners, but also Mrs. Trollope's belief that a European education was superior to any obtained in America. Mrs. Trollope's preference for Europe over America is elsewhere revealed in her sympathetic portrayal of the Steinmetz family, Whitlaw's German neighbors. Set in direct contrast to his evil, their good nature is rewarded by an invitation from relatives to return to their homeland—an opportunity of which they take immediate advantage. In both Trollope's life and art, residence in Europe is generally preferable to life in America.

Although Juno's domestic experience is one of unremitting tragedy, she emerges from periods of insanity alert enough to devote her remaining energies to outwitting the malevolent plans of J. J. Whitlaw, something she does “with the most perfect confidence of success” (Whitlaw II:14). Her strongest assets in this battle are her cunning, Whitlaw's superstitious distrust, and her knowledge of English letters. Thus, when Whitlaw discovers her in the forest alone reciting English poetry learned in her youth, she convinces him that she is engaged in mysterious spiritual incantations. Ironically, Juno's use of English letters, which she had gained from an earlier English master, is perceived as a peculiar sort of madness. In most slave narratives of the period, literacy is identified as a crucial aid to freedom. Trollope's novel emphasizes the value of literacy in a variety of episodes, but not in the traditional sense: literacy mixed with cunning is the best means by which a slave—and, in other novels, a woman alone—can outwit the restrictive patriarchal structures which surround her. Juno's exercise of subversive behavior reflects her kinship to the trickster figure of African-American folklore and adds much to the delineation of her character: “… the glidings and the slidings, the creepings and the crawlings, the unseen exits and the unsuspected entrances [were the means] by which Juno learned all she wanted to know, and by aid of which she appeared wherever she wanted to be found” (Whitlaw II:14).

The challenge of outwitting Whitlaw, however, cannot obviate the pain associated with the absence of her family. For many years, Juno is sustained by the memory of her daughter, whom she imagines to be the mother of a long line of English beauties and with whom she longs to be reunited. Though her dream is partly fulfilled when her granddaughter Selina returns to America, her sufferings are multiplied when Selina commits suicide. Overwhelmed by the shameful knowledge of her black ancestry, Selina first showers her bedroom with heavily scented flowers and crowns her head with a carefully woven floral wreath. Leaving behind only a brief but moving farewell letter for her doting, aristocratic father, she absolves herself from the sin of suicide by taking last communion, and swallows laudanum to relieve her pain. The melodrama of this scene, while excessive, is effective in emphasizing the pervasive tragedy of Juno's life and the disgrace which many white Americans attached to mixed racial ancestry.

Though the fate of Selina is by far her most dramatic and extreme representation of the quadroon's unfortunate experiences, Mrs. Trollope offers many other, similar portraits of the same character type, identified both in this novel and in Domestic Manners as the “race apart.” Her descriptions of the quadroon ball are typical of those of other nineteenth-century fiction and travel writers in that they identify unusual female beauty and elegance at the same time that they recognize that the ball provides for the male attendant “the signal for letting loose all the worst feelings and passions of his nature” (Whitlaw II:231). Trollope also describes the insults with which the quadroon was treated in her relationship to the business community. When Edward Bligh, the abolitionist, is driven to seek employment for his sister, he enters a store staffed by a beautiful young woman

whose delicate complexion had a slight shade of that peculiar tinge which marks the quadroon in Louisiana. … Beautiful, graceful, elegant and gentle as she was, he dared not place his sister near her. Let her moral character be what it might, disgrace must of necessity be coupled with her name. Her remarkable beauty made it certain that she must be addressed with the most brutal and unchecked licentiousness by every dissolute fellow that approached her.

(Whitlaw I:267-68)

Edward places his sister in the care of a “safer” though far less kindly white mistress, while the quadroon is left to run her business alone. Mrs. Trollope, who first observed such heartbreaking circumstances in New Orleans, called this ironic contrast between the character and singular beauty of the quadroon and her mistreatment in society at large the “most violent and most inveterate” of American prejudices (Domestic Manners 10). Trollope's portrayal of the tragic mulatto anticipates what Frances Smith Foster identifies as “the earliest and most pervasive image of the female protagonist in African-American literature.¹²

Trollope's championship of both the feminist and antislavery causes, as well as her bias in favor of European culture, is brought together in the character of Lucy Bligh, an American abolitionist closely resembling the American girl of Trollope's first novel. Like Emily, the heroine of Trollope's The Refugee in America (1836), she is attractive, strong willed, and literate, but her moral commitment is to abolition rather than to a lover. In this cause, she takes significant personal risks to help the slaves by befriending and instructing them. Her most harrowing personal experience occurs as she tries to evade the wrathful pursuit of Whitlaw, who suspects her of organizing a slave rebellion. As he chases her through the forest, she is rescued by a group of friendly Choctaw Indians, whose strange appearance frightens Whitlaw away and protects Lucy. Once again, Trollope's manipulation of plot seems inappropriate, though it is not without precedent in the slave narratives of the period.

Lucy's reward for heroism is an invitation from her European friends to visit the Old World—an opportunity she readily accepts. In this plot development, Trollope again betrays her English bias by implying that England is an ideal place of refuge for those who suffer most from slavery. Thus, just as America, according to popular myth, was the refuge of the lawless, the poor, and ignoble, so England, in Mrs. Trollope's work, became the home of the honorable, the educated, the abolitionist and his friends. The abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1833 by an act of Parliament did, in fact, reflect a general predisposition on the part of the English in favor of abolition. Trollope's plot embraces this aspect of English popular sentiment though it fails to explore the complexities of race relations in that country.

The white abolitionist, the quadroon, and the black female slave share in their alienation from the Southern ruling class; nevertheless, they develop among themselves a network of love and support. Inspired by her many misfortunes, Juno becomes a capable protector of each of these women and a focus for their activities: she rescues the slave Phoebe from rape; she protects Lucy from Southern racists; she protects herself by generating an aura of mystery around her person. Through her many subversive efforts, Juno becomes the spiritual center for female activity and a vital link to a larger network in which each woman finds personal and often physical refuge. It is a network which suggests, in Auerbach's terms, “an antisociety, an austere banishment from both social power and biological rewards” but which at the same time offers “subtle unexpected power.”¹³ A network of female friendships had been a part of Mrs. Trollope's own life, and she knew firsthand its value for survival.¹⁴ Though Juno is unique among the many strong-minded women of Trollope's later novels because of her age, race, and peculiar circumstances, she shares with them an instinct for survival and female solidarity.

The prominence in this novel of a character who is both black and female suggests an important aspect of the American feminist movement which was to develop more fully after the publication of Frances Trollope's novel. Many of the strongest advocates for women's rights were at the same time committed to abolition. Perhaps the earliest and most forceful examples of women who joined their interests in these two important reform movements in America were the Grimke sisters, who, Gerda Lerner suggests, “[w]hether by accident or design … had come to represent in the public mind the fusion of abolition and woman's rights.”¹⁵ Both Angelina and Sarah Grimke crusaded energetically and wrote prolifically on behalf of both movements. In her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1838), for example, Sarah Grimke surveyed laws that deprived women of their rights as citizens and argued for improved working conditions outside the home. She denounced the inferior, marriage-centered education offered to women; most importantly, as Lerner has put it, she “drew parallels between the status of the slave and that of women, and attacked with particular sharpness the degradation of slave women.”¹⁶ Through characters like Juno and Lucy Blight, Mrs. Trollope demonstrates her ideological sympathy with such currents of feminist reform in mid-century America and shows the progressive nature of her position by English standards.

In spite of her feminist views, Mrs. Trollope was quick to recognize that among the worst abusers of the slave system were wealthy Creole women whose leisure aggravated already deeply imbedded racist attitudes. Trollope's Creole women in Whitlaw are modeled after those in Domestic Manners; they choose intellectual and physical inactivity over a life of purposeful social involvement, a pattern which generates a perverted moral sense. When Whitlaw visits New Orleans in search of allies for his slave-trading activities, he encounters

a very young little, round, pale, black-eyed woman sunk deep into a kangaroo chair, with one of her little feet dangling from it, and the toe of the other supported on the shoulder of a young negro boy fantastically dressed, who sat on the floor beside her. … Her attitude was one that might have rendered rising difficult to any woman, but to a creole it was impossible. She therefore clapped her miniature white hands together; … it was heard and obeyed by another black fairy in the dress of an oriental page, turbaned and trousered in delicate white muslin, with a tiny vest of yellow satin, belted with gold. …

In truth the pretty Olinda was still a child in age; and such, if report say true, are the childish ways of some of the little ladies of New Orleans.

(Whitlaw II: 255, 256, 261)

Trollope uses the physical stature and emotional immaturity of the Creole woman as a means by which to emphasize her meanness of spirit and twisted moral sense. She is vindictive and psychopathically abusive toward her slaves. Trollope suggests, though she does not explore in depth, the many complications inherent in interracial female relationships and portrays through such characters the extremes of violence toward which many white women were driven against their slaves. Though Trollope depicts elsewhere in her fiction the cruelty of white women toward their slaves, she has omitted from her cast of characters the plantation owner's white wife who must confront her husband's infidelity in the form of mulatto children.

Trollope balances the many serious social concerns related to slavery with some romantic levity: both Lucy and the slave girl Phoebe are carried off to England by lovers, while Jonathan's aunt uses her large inheritance to help her friends and neighbors. But she never lets us forget that America is the home of a terrible social institution. Unlike The Refugee in America (1836), in which the predominant narrative interests set in America turn upon adventure and romance, Whitlaw is a novel of social criticism. The picture which Frances Trollope gives of life in the American South is chillingly graphic, and though she may have offended the more prudish Victorian readers by her realism, she appealed to others because of her serious social intent, her empathetic characters, and the vivid evocation of suicide, murder, attempted rape, and racial prejudice. Whitlaw is assassinated by Juno for his cruelty to slaves; Edward Bligh, Lucy's brother, is murdered by a lynch mob for his abolitionist activities; and Juno's beautiful descendent Selina commits suicide rather than suffer the social ostracism that is her fate as a quadroon. Mrs. Trollope's awareness of the many social repercussions of slavery thus parallels the concerns of English antislavery propaganda. Abolishing slavery was but the first step in a long struggle to deal with the social unrest and human displacement that were the legacies of this practice.

As in her first novel, Trollope portrays American women in Whitlaw as both oppressed victims and triumphant manipulators of circumstance. Here, however, the source of oppression is most clearly linked to the institution of slavery rather than to other prevailing cultural norms, and the women who triumph, like Juno, Lucy, and Phoebe, are those who work to end its influence. Significantly, their success is a result of both individual and collective effort directed against a firmly entrenched racist patriarchy.

Though she had made a major contribution to the emerging body of antislavery literature, Frances Trollope never returned to slavery as a major theme for her work, although she does portray aspects of slave life in her third American-related work, The Barnabys in America (1843). Here, she depicts a slave revolt and ensuing massacre of white plantation owners and suggests her awareness of the loyalties that were often cultivated between some slaves and their kinder white owners. Subsequent novels devoted entirely to social concerns, however, focused on other important, though related issues. The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837), for example, attacks the unsettling emotional appeal of evangelical religion, while Father Eustace: A Tale of the Jesuits (1847) focuses on Jesuitical legalism. The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1839) is perhaps Trollopes's most effective attempt to address the problem of industrialism. To write this novel, Frances Trollope personally investigated the working conditions of factories in Manchester and wrote with the declared purpose of awakening the national conscience to the experiences of factory children. The same crusading spirit motivated the writing of Jessie Phillips: A Tale of the Present Day (1843), a novel which explores the negative effect of the poor laws, particularly on fallen women. Finally, in both Charles Chesterfield: or the Adventures of a Youth of Genius (1841) and The Blue Belles of England (1842), Mrs. Trollope mocks the fashionable literary world of London in which she lived, and at which she could afford, literally, to laugh. The proliferation of novels of social concern that were produced in the 1840s vindicated Mrs. Trollope's courageous first effort of social criticism in Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw.

There was a price to pay for so boldly addressing the subject of slavery in fiction. Mrs. Trollope was accused of exaggeration and caricature, and her work, like that of other female abolitionists, was attacked on the basis of the supposedly disgusting and unfeminine nature of her subject. Moreover, even though in her fiction Mrs. Trollope refers to herself as a “historian” (Whitlaw I:112), critics felt that exposing the injustices of society was a task that should remain with bona fide historians, clerics, or journalists, not literary artists. The Athenaeum, belittling her efforts, clearly articulated this view: “If we are to read of cruel overseers and licentious clerks, and a brutalized race of human creatures degraded into property, let it be in the grave and calm pages of the advocate or the historian; but do not let them disfigure the fairyland of fiction.”¹⁷ Other critics considered her vulgar subject to be of little relevance to English audiences. (They ignored the fact that although slavery had been outlawed in 1833, it was not until 1838, after a bloody slave revolt in Jamaica, that all slaves on English soil were legally freed). Most American audiences, still smarting from the critical remarks of Domestic Manners, continued to be outraged by her attack on American culture, though abolitionist sympathizers no doubt appreciated the “accurate” account she gave of slavery's atrocities. To such comments, as she had in the past, Mrs. Trollope turned a deaf ear as she continued her career as a writer. She persevered, guided by both imagination and conscience, driven to fulfil her personal credo as once expressed to her lifelong friend and supporter, Miss Mitford:

Allez toujours is what those who know the world best always say to the happy ones of the earth, who are sailing before the wind. Allez toujours and you will reach a station which no woman has ever reached before.¹⁸

In many respects, Mrs. Trollope attained this high station in life as a result of her efforts on behalf of the American abolitionist movement. She deserves to be recognized for her achievement.

Notes

1. The best critical work on Frances Trollope to date is Helen Heineman's Mrs. Trollope: The Triumphant Feminine in the Nineteenth Century (Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 1979). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

2. The New Monthly Magazine 55 (March 1839): 417.

3. Hereafter referred to as Whitlaw.

4. See James Walvin, “The Propaganda of Anti-Slavery,” in Slavery and British Society 1776-1846, ed. James Walvin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1982): 49-68. See also Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1972), for a thorough discussion of eighteenth and nineteenth-century antislavery pamphlets and travel journals.

5. Frances Milton Trollope, letter to Richard Bentley, 24 June 1835, Robert H. Taylor Collection, Princeton University Library, Princeton University, Princeton.

6. Frances Milton Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. Donald Smalley (New York: Knopf, 1949) 404. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Domestic Manners, followed by the page number(s).

7. See Winifred Morgan, An American Icon, Brother Jonathan and American Identity (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1988).

8. There were at least five slave narratives published in England by 1836, and probably many more published in the U. S. were available in England by the time Mrs. Trollope was writing J. J. Whitlaw. Although there is no accurate record of which ones Mrs. Trollope may have read, it is reasonable to assume that she was acquainted with this body of literature and that she incorporated many of their themes and characters in her own work.

9. Frances Milton Trollope, The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or, Scenes on the Mississippi, 2 vols. (London: Bentley, 1836) I:7. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Whitlaw, followed by the volume and page number(s).

10. Elizabeth Schultz explores the complexity of interracial friendships between women as they are portrayed in a variety of African-American texts. See “Out of the Woods and into the World: A Study of Interracial Friendships between Women in American Novels,” in Conjuring, Black Women, Fiction and Literary Tradition, ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985) 67-85.

11. This combination of magical powers and the ability to tell engaging stories is a quality that Marjorie Pryse acknowledges as a tradition among black women. See Marjorie Pryse, “Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and the ‘Ancient’ Power’ of Black women,” in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and Literary Tradition, ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985) 1-24.

    The fact that her slaves have classical names would probably have endeared them to readers educated in English schools and as well suggests the tendency of many popular novelists to elevate the Black to the level of early Romantic caricature (see Walvin 58, footnote 4 above).

12. Frances Smith Foster, “Adding Color and Contour to Early American Self-Portraitures: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women,” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1985) 34.

13. Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women, An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978) 3.

14. See Helen Heineman's Restless Angels: The Friendship of Six Victorian Women (Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 1983) for an analysis of the network of female friendships that supported Frances Trollope throughout her life.

15. Gerda Lerner, “The Grimke Sisters: Women and the Abolition Movement,” Our American Sisters, Women in American Life and Thought, ed. Jean E. Friedman and William G. Shade (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1974) 159.

16. Lerner 150.

17. Unsigned review of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, or, Scenes from the Mississippi, Athenaeum 453 (1836): 462-63.

18. Frances Milton Trollope, letter to Mary Russell Mitford, n.d. except June and summer 1826, in The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as Recorded in Letters from Her Literary Correspondents, 2 vols., ed. Alfred Guy L'Estrange, 1882.