What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

I find in another letter, dated (by my father) 6th December, 1808, the following George-the-Thirdian passage: “The most disagreeable of created beings, Col. —— by name, by profession Sir ——’s led captain, is, while I am writing, talking in an animated strain of eloquence to Mrs. Milton” (my grandfather the vicar’s second wife and the writer’s stepmother), “frequently seasoning his discourse with the polished phrase, ‘Blood and thunder, ma’am!’ so if I happen to swear a little before I conclude, be so good as to believe that I am accidentally writing down what he is saying.... Poor dear innocent Dr. Nott! His simplicity is quite pathetic! I am really afraid that he will be taking twopence instead of two pounds from his parishioners, merely because he does not know the difference between them. I cannot help feeling a tender interest for such lamb-like innocence of the ways of this wicked world. I dare say the night I saw him at the opera, he thought he was only” (note the distinction) “at the play, nay, perhaps believed they were performing an oratorio.”

In one letter of the 9th of April, 1809, I find a mention of “a frank” sent by Mr. Mathias with a translation by him into Italian of the “Echo Song” in Comus, of which the writer says that it is “elegantly done, but is not Milton.”

In another of the 18th of May, 1809—the last before the marriage took place—I find the following, which may interest some people. “I wish you could be here to-morrow,” she writes, “we are going to see the prisoners of war at Odiam (near Reading) perform one of Molière’s plays. Two years ago we attended several of them, and I never enjoyed anything more.”

More than a score of these faded eighty-year-old letters are before me; and I might perhaps have gleaned from them some other little touches illustrative of men and manners when George the Third was king, but were I to yield to all the temptations of the sort that beset the path on which I am travelling, I should try my readers’ patience beyond all hope of forgiveness.

My mother had brought home with her the MS. of a couple of volumes on America; and the principal business on hand when I came home from Oxford was the finding a publisher for these. In this quest she was zealously and very energetically assisted by Captain Basil Hall, himself the author of a work on America and sundry other books, which at that time had made a considerable reputation. Basil Hall’s book on America did not take a favourable view of the Americans or their institutions; and it had been mercilessly attacked and accused of misrepresentation by all the critics of the Liberal party. For Hall’s book, and everything else concerning America, was in those days looked at from a political party point of view. America and the Americans were understood to be anti-everything that was dear to Conservatives. They were accordingly the pets of the Whigs (Radicals and Radicalism had not yet emerged into the ken of respectable folk, either Whig or Tory), and Hall’s book had been abused accordingly. He was very sore about the accusations of untruthfulness, and was delighted with a book which supported his assertions and his views. How my mother came to be introduced to him, and how it came to pass that the MS. of her work was shown to him, I do not remember, but the result was that he was zealously eager for the publication of it. The title, if I recollect rightly, was proposed by him. The Domestic Manners of the Americans was published, and made an immediate and great success. It was emphatically the book of the season, was talked of everywhere, and read by all sorts and conditions of men and women. It was highly praised by all the Conservative organs of the press, and vehemently abused by all those of the opposite party. Edition after edition was sold, and the pecuniary results were large enough to avert from the family of the successful authoress the results of her husband’s ruined fortunes.

The Americans were made very angry by this account of their “domestic manners”—very naturally, but not very wisely. Of course, it was asserted that many of the statements made were false and many of the descriptions caricatured. Nothing in the book from beginning to end was false; nothing of minutest detail which was asserted to have been seen had not been seen; nor was anything intentionally caricatured or exaggerated for the sake of enhancing literary effect. But the tone of the book was unfriendly, and was throughout the result of offended taste rather than of well-weighed opinion. It was full of universal conclusions drawn from particular premises; and no sufficient weight, or rather no weight at all, was allowed to the fact that the observations on which the recorded judgments were founded had been gathered almost entirely in what was then the Far West, and represented the “domestic manners” of the Atlantic states hardly at all. Unquestionably the book was a very clever one, and written with infinite verve and brightness. But—save for the fact that censure and satire are always more amusing than the reverse—an equally clever and equally truthful book might have been written in a diametrically opposite spirit.

No doubt the markedly favourable reception of the book was what mainly irritated our American cousins. But they certainly were angry far beyond what the importance of the matter would seem to have justified. I remember that Colley Grattan, whose fame as the author of Highways and Byways was then at its zenith, in writing to me from Boston, where he resided for many years as British Consul, inviting me to visit him there, went into the question of the reception I might be likely to meet with on that side of the Atlantic. “I think,” he wrote, “that to come over under a false name would be infra dig. But really I fear that if you come under your own, you may be in for a dig!”

Whether Grattan exaggerated the wrath of his Bostonian friends for the sake of his joke, I do not know. Unquestionably the Americans, even speaking of them as a nation, were made very angry by my mother’s book. But the anger was not of a very spiteful or rancorous description, for from that day to this I have never met with anything but kindness and cordial friendliness from all the Americans I have known—and I have known very many.

The return of my mother, and the success of her book, produced a change in the condition and circumstances of affairs at home which resembled the transformation scene in a pantomime that takes place at the advent of the good fairy. Even the old farm-house at Harrow Weald was brightened up physically, and to a far greater degree morally, by her presence. But we did not remain long there. Very shortly she took us back to Harrow, not to the large house built by my father on Lord Northwick’s land, but to another very good house on the same farm—not above a stone’s throw from the previous one, which he had made (very imprudently) by adding to and improving the original farm-house—a very comfortable residence. This was the house which the world has heard of as “Orley Farm.”

And there my mother became immediately surrounded by many old friends and many new ones. I remember among the latter Letitia Landon, better known to the world as “L. E. L.” She was a petite figure, very insignificant-looking, with a sharp chin, turn-up nose, and on the whole rather piquante face, though without any pretension to good looks. I remember her being seated one day at dinner by the side of a certain dignitary of the Church, who had the reputation of being more of a bon vivant than a theologian, and who was old enough to have been her father; and on my asking her afterwards what they had been talking about so earnestly, as I had seen them, “About eating, to be sure!” said she. “I always talk to everybody on their strong point. I told him that writing poetry was my trade, but that eating was my pleasure, and we were fast friends before the fish was finished!” Her sad fate and tragic ending, poor soul! attracted much attention and sympathy at the time. And doubtless fate and the world used her hardly; but she was one of those who never under any circumstances would have run a straight and prosperous course.