The Social Problem Novels of Frances Trollope
General Editor: Brenda Ayres
Contributing Editors: Christine Sutphin, Douglas Murray, Priti Joshi and Ann-Barbara Graff
The Pickering Masters
978 1 85196 972 2: 234x156mm: £350.00/$650.00
Frances Milton Trollope (1779–1863) was a prolific, provocative and hugely successful novelist. She greatly influenced the generation of mid-Victorian novelists who came after her such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. This is the first modern, scholarly, annotated edition of Frances Trollope’s social problem novels.
Trollope’s novels brought her readers into contact with a wide range of social issues. Her novels dealt with work issues, such as child labour, unsafe working conditions, excessive hours and poor wages. She campaigned against the bastardy clause in the Poor Laws, which absolved fathers from financial responsibility for their illegitimate children. She was also a committed abolitionist, having spent three years in Ohio where she heard first hand the stories of cruelty that slaves experienced in the South. These were told by slaves fleeing from slave-holding Kentucky into free Ohio. Trollope marketed her books carefully to maximise public outrage and expected her readers to put pressure on parliament to legislate reform.
The novels included in this edition are not available in any modern scholarly print or electronic edition. The set includes a general introduction, volume introductions, headnotes and endnotes. It will be important for those studying and researching Nineteenth-Century Studies, Women’s Writing and the History of the Novel.
- Restores a neglected voice to the nineteenth-century canon
- Edited and introduced by leading Trollope scholars
- Shows how literature influenced legislative reform during the nineteenth century
- New editorial material includes a general introduction, volume introductions, headnotes and endnotes
Contents
Volume 1
The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw: Or Scenes on the Mississippi (1836)
This ground-breaking novel was the first piece of fiction to incense readers about the evils of slavery. Trollope spent two-and-a-half years in America, mostly in Cincinnati, Ohio. There, she witnessed the desperate escape of slaves crossing the Ohio River from the neighbouring slave state of Kentucky into Ohio. She left the city shortly before Harriet Beecher Stowe arrived, but the pair became correspondents and friends. Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw was highly influential on Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, 'the little book', which Abraham Lincoln said 'started this big war'. The novel has been out of print since 1857 and is not available electronically.
Volume 2
The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837)
Although Trollope approved of religiously-charged social reform, she warned her readers to guard their hearts from unscrupulous religious leaders who meant only to take their money, control them and ruin them through licentious behaviour. The Vicar of Wrexhill depicts a widow, made socially helpless because of the death of her husband, who is taken advantage of by her vicar, marries him and allows herself to fall under his total control. This not only leads to her death and the death of a child born out of their union, it alienates the other children, jeopardizes their inheritance, throws the entire parish into a havoc, and enthrals the youngest daughter in a religious frenzy that exacts her sanity. This is the first modern scholarly edition.
Volume 3
The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840)
This sympathetic and shocking portrayal of children in industry provoked an outrage that led to the revision of the Factory Act. The new law forbade the hiring of children younger than eight years of age and their working more than six-and-a-half hours per day. To gain a maximum audience to read her message, Trollope had her book sold in monthly instalments at one shilling each, which was very rare for women writers. Michael Armstrong established a prototypical paradigm for a heroine visiting the home of a factory labourer, and through her eyes, urging society to show mercy and kindness to the unfortunate, a model later used by Elizabeth Gaskell in Mary Barton and North and South, George Eliot in Adam Bede, and Charles Dickens in Hard Times. This is the first modern scholarly edition.
Volume 4
Jessie Phillips: A Tale of the Present Day (1843)
Jessie Phillips was serialized. This marketing practice aimed to gather a head of steam and instigate outrage over the bastardy clause in the 1834 Poor Law, which placed the sole responsibility for illegitimate children on the mother. As the novel appeared from December 1842 through November 1843, Trollope received an avalanche of mail by readers greatly moved by her story. Less than one year after the first appearance of Jessie Phillips, the House of Commons passed the Little Poor Law. It included a new bastardy clause which held fathers financially responsible for their illegitimate children. This is the first modern scholarly edition.
Related titles
- The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell
- Varieties of Women's Sensation Fiction, 1855–1890
- Victorian Social Activists’ Novels