On the strength of these figures there seemed nothing rash in encountering the risk of an early union. Accordingly, on the twenty-third of the proverbially unlucky month of May 1809, the marriage was celebrated at the bride’s home, Heckfield. Then came the settlement at 16 Keppel Street; there they remained almost uninterruptedly until their migration to Harrow. There too were born their first five children; while two daughters came in Harrow Weald. Of this family, five died before they were sixty, the eldest son, Thomas Adolphus, and the third, Anthony, dealt with in these pages, reached the threshold of old age, though Anthony fell short by fifteen years of his elder brother’s term. As soon as the Keppel Street children could, in nursery phrase, take notice, they must have found themselves observed by interesting and distinguished company. The father was known among solicitors for a man quite as able as he was queer-tempered, and for a thoroughly sound lawyer. He had also just chanced upon one of those little personal advertisements sometimes useful at the Bar. His friend the artist Hayter was then, on the Duke of Bedford’s commission, painting the picture that speedily became famous, Lord William Russell’s trial; in Thomas Anthony Trollope he found the original for a foremost member of the legal group of spectators in the court.
Forensic success, however well won by brains, knowledge, and industry, sometimes suddenly, sometimes by faintly observed degrees, is apt to melt away. The head of the Keppel Street household could found, and to some extent build up, a valuable practice, but he was without the temper or tact which would ensure a politic or even a civil answer to a fool. And to him, especially in the legal world, most people seemed fools. The attorneys who brought briefs to his chambers, if their replies to his questions did not exactly suit his phraseological whim, found themselves as browbeaten as if they had been refractory or prevaricating witnesses badgered by a cross-examining counsel. For a long time Thomas Anthony Trollope’s clients meekly submitted to their fate, and, notwithstanding his ill-temper and unpopularity, the bitter-tongued lawyer made so handsome an income as to exchange the fogs of the Bloomsbury home for the clear air and fine views of a bracing suburb. Harrow, as within an easy drive of the law courts, was the spot selected. The residence, substantially built after its owner’s designs, and comfortably furnished, received the name of Julians. But though from one point of view a monument of Thomas Anthony Trollope’s legal triumphs, it proved a forerunner of his fall. As if under the breath of some evil genius, who could have been none other than himself, the rising fabric of his professional prosperity, by slow but sure degrees, crumbled into dust. Once having discovered that they could get their work done practically as well elsewhere by counsel not superior to the common courtesies of life, the long-enduring solicitors brought their papers to Trollope no more. Every week ruin, crushing and complete, drew visibly nearer. At last there was decided on a move of the whole family from Keppel Street to Julians.
Thomas Anthony Trollope’s New College Fellowship implied a competent acquaintance with Greek and Latin; he had shown his turn for the law when he won the Vinerian Scholarship. His ambition was that his sons should follow in his steps. Beginning to despair of that, he grew discontented with his own position at the Bar, notwithstanding his brilliant start as an equity lawyer. The growing infirmities of his temper frightened away clients; his practice fell off. With something like infatuation he resolved on exchanging a profession in which he might have made his fortune, and could still have done well, for a pursuit so absolutely ruinous as farming. For the failure now in store his own perverse impetuosity could alone be blamed. He was the most industrious of men, as well as the most exemplary and self-denying in all the relationships of life. “The truth is,” said Anthony Trollope, “my father soon found that the three or four hundred acre farm, which he rented of Lord Northwick, had been taken by him on a false representation of its opportunities. Even in the bitterness of spirit caused by the consequent disillusion, he looked forward, as he said, ‘to some compensation in having more time to teach me and my brother Tom our classics.’”
The Julians experiment initiated a series of reverses that beggared the father; it would have left the sons without home or education, but for the extraordinary exertions of a resourceful, gifted, and heroic wife. Anthony Trollope’s mother had an indomitable faculty of finding material for success in the very welter of misfortune. The eligible modern mansion Julians had, of course, soon to be deserted for the much less dignified and commodious Julians farm. Next came settlement beneath a smaller and meaner roof. Even here Mrs. Trollope contrived almost miraculously to transform her environment, and convert what threatened to become a ruin into an habitable if not a comfortable shelter. It was only after her departure on missions of domestic duty that Anthony Trollope and his father realised the full misery growing out of the removal from Bloomsbury to Harrow Weald. Weak lungs had been inherited by most of the children from their father, whose health now, under the quickly successive trials, had permanently given way. Further gold invested in the agricultural experiment would, it had now become clear, only pave and hasten the approach to the Bankruptcy Court.
“If he looks at a card, if he rattles a box,
Away fly the guineas from this Mr. Fox.”
The sentiment of the familiar couplet was exactly applicable to Thomas Anthony Trollope. Except in the possession of the most capable and unselfish wife in the world, and of children all intellectually above the average, and in two instances destined to achieve fame as well as fortune, fate and luck had an undying grudge against him. Part of his little house property had become commercially useless because the title-deeds were lost. At the same time something went wrong with money which, at her marriage, had been settled on Mrs. Trollope.
Mrs. Amelia Jenks Bloomer and Bloomerism did not become household words till 1849. Almost fifty years Mrs. Bloomer’s senior, Robert Owen had acquired in the State of Indiana twenty thousand acres of land for establishing a communistic colony near the Wabash River, known as New Harmony. Miss Frances Wright constituted herself in England at once the missionary of Owen’s socialistic gospel and, by her habit, the anticipatory pioneer of the Bloomer dress. In the Bloomer costume, afterwards a standing subject of pictorial jokes in Punch, she delivered a series of enthusiastic lectures throughout the south of England. By her various proofs of disinterested zeal for the movement, she secured first the interest, then the admiration and friendship, of the lady who presided over the Trollope ménage successively in London and at Harrow, and whose natural sympathies always impelled her towards whatever novelty might excite popular laughter and opposition. The short tunic, the wide sash round the waist, the full trousers gathered in at the ankles, and the broad-brimmed straw hat, generally held in the hand, all proclaiming the presence of the earliest lady lecturer from the new world, were soon familiar beneath the Trollope roof. They imprinted themselves indelibly on the young Anthony’s mind. About the same time he made some other useful or interesting acquaintances of a cosmopolitan sort. Chief amongst these was the French republican soldier, General Lafayette, who had fought in the United States army against the English. The Trollope family’s experiences, whenever and wherever gathered, formed a common stock on which all might and did draw as they chose for conversational or literary use. In his parents’ earlier continental trips Henry was the son usually taken, Anthony being left behind to the tender mercies of his brother Tom, and his school work at Winchester. Afterwards, however, Anthony found himself compensated for missing his share in these earlier excursions by a quick succession, in a few years, of more pleasure trips abroad than a lifetime brings to most English boys.
For the moment, however, the effect of Miss Wright’s visits to Julians or to the other Harrow abodes was to fill Thomas Anthony Trollope with dreams of regaining in the new world what he had lost in the old; and the rest of that clever but self-deluded good man’s record really suggests an exaggerated version, from which Dickens’s genius shrank, of the money-making experiments resorted to by Wilkins Micawber. America was a young country, just acquiring a taste for the prettinesses and elegancies of life. A bazaar or store for fancy goods, not of course in New York, but at some provincial capital like Cincinnati, might prove a success. The premises might also include a room to be used for lectures or fine art exhibitions; if the latter, the French artist, Auguste Hervieu, had long been an intimate of the Trollope household, and might render valuable service. As a fact, the accomplished and amiable Gaul had already been induced by Miss Wright to establish himself on American soil. Nashoba, however, whither he had been directed, disappointed him; he was now free to place himself entirely at the disposition of Mrs. Trollope and the son, Henry, who had accompanied her. Commercially, the transatlantic trip miscarried not less signally than everything else to which Anthony Trollope’s father put his hand. At the same time it turned his wife into a highly popular author, and created in her third son, then a lad of seventeen, a determination to imitate the maternal performance. The United States experience also provided a theme for her earliest essay at recovering with her pen the prosperity that had been blighted by her husband’s evil star. Even in some of the later fiction that proved the chief gold-mine, Frances Trollope brought in her American experiences. These, however, long before that, had formed the exclusive subject of the book on which alone her earliest reputation rested. Domestic Manners of the Americans had been roughed out in a first draft before her return voyage to England was at an end.
By this time, her husband’s embarrassments had reached the desperate stage. In 1834 came the final crash. Mrs. Trollope now divided her time between the direction of her home and the preparation of the book which was to support it. Her husband occupied himself with his pen to less profitable account. Even the pretence of farming had been well-nigh given up. Early one morning in the March of 1834, young Anthony, then a Harrow boy of nineteen in his last half, was told to drive his father to London in the gig, which up to that time had been retained. To the boy’s surprise, the point to be made for was not the more or less familiar legal quarter, but St. Katherine’s Docks. Here the father disappeared into a vessel bound for Antwerp; the lad regained the cottage at Harrow, to find it in the bailiffs’ hands. The landlord, Lord Northwick, had in fact put in an execution. The Trollopes, however, had made substantial and loyal friends in the Harrow district. To know Mrs. Trollope was to admire her courageous activity under calamities, crushing or paralysing in their character and degree. When her own roof-tree had been rooted up, offers of hospitality poured in from every side. Still the eventual necessity of securing a home remained. The father of the family had found the conventional ambulatory solution of the difficulty, and, giving his creditors the security of “leg-bail,” had fled, as we have seen, across the Channel. For the present their settlement was Bruges, a house called the Château D’Hondt, just outside St. Catharine Gate. Here the father recedes into the background. The central figure of the whole Belgian episode is his wife, who during these years left the impress of her own personality, moral and intellectual, in characters so distinct upon her son that her example decided for him what was to be his life’s business. Her pen formed the staff on which the whole family leaned, and alone supported the roof which sheltered them. Her husband’s days were visibly numbered. Lung disease of a hopeless kind had set in with her son Henry and her daughter Emily. Always nursing her invalids, she never failed to produce her daily tale of “copy” for the printer.
At the time of her husband’s death in 1835 she was busy at, and soon after published, her work on Paris and the French. The vivacity and truth of this volume made it a success within a few weeks of its coming out. It was not till some years later, when her son Anthony, preparing at the time for authorship, directed attention to it, that its chapter devoted to George Sand was discovered to be the best thing of its kind that had yet come from an English pen. Mrs. Trollope’s books, beginning with Domestic Manners of the Americans in 1832 and, twenty-four years later, ending with Fashionable Life, were mostly written in the intervals of nursing, feeding, and in all ways caring for husband and children smitten with a mortal disease. So far as they influenced her third son, they will be reverted to in these pages. Mrs. Trollope was a well-born, well-bred, well-connected, delicately nurtured as well as exemplary woman. Her father, William Milton, the Heckfield clergyman, had gone to the ancient and honourable stock of Gresleys for his bride. The daughter of this marriage, Frances, had from her childhood lived in the best society, metropolitan or provincial, during its most exclusive periods. Her wealthier relatives and acquaintances never allowed their connection with her to drop. Hence the opportunities which, quite as much as those given by his paternal relationships, introduced Anthony Trollope himself, as a young man, to the most desirable houses of his day.