Books: Trollope's Comeback

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Last week it seemed that Trollope was making a popular comeback in the U.S. too. "I am asked for 'anything by Trollope' five times a day," reported the owner of one of Manhattan's largest second-hand bookshops. The San Francisco Public Library reported Trollope withdrawals to be 76% greater than last year. Boston booksellers "simply can't supply the demand."

In 1940, Random House reprinted one of Trollope's finest, most appealing novels, The American Senator (with an enthusiastic preface by the late, famed bibliophile, A. Edward Newton, founder of the U.S.'s tiny Trollope Society). The sales were negligible. This year, Oxford University Press's reprinting of Is He Popenjoy? has been completely sold out, along with most other reprints of Trollope in Oxford's admirable World Classics Series. To crown the Trollope revival, Doubleday Doran has republished, at a fancy price and with lavish, Dickensian illustrations. Trollope's most popular novel, Barchester Towers.

Father in Cincinnati. Cincinnati is one of the U.S. cities which has reported no interest in Trollope—perhaps because Trollope's parents are part & parcel of Cincinnati history. To the young Midwest metropolis, in 1828, went eccentric Frances Trollope who was later followed by her equally eccentric lawyer husband, Thomas, (they left their 13-year-old son, Anthony, back in England with his brothers and sisters).

To Cincinnati's astonishment, the Trollopes proceeded to erect what one traveler described as "the great deformity of the city" — a brick bazaar with "Gothic windows, Grecian pillars ... a Turkish dome, and Egyptian devices." Therein, they planned to sell the gewgaws of Manchester and Birmingham to the savages of Cincinnati.

Within three years, the Trollopes were back in England, so destitute that they could hardly buy shoes for their five children; "Trollope's Folly" remained standing until 1881, becoming successively the home of the Ohio Mechanics Society and a popular bawdyhouse. No whit discouraged, Thomas Trollope set to work erecting a new folly — this time, an eight-volume encyclopedic history of the world's monasteries and convents, "with all their orders and subdivisions." The family began to sicken and starve. Frances Trollope decided that only she could save it.

Prolific Mother. At 50, with no pre vious experience, she began to pour out volume after volume of remunerative fiction and travelogue. Most of the characters she introduced were old friends and acquaintances: "Of course," she said airily, "I always pulp (them) before serving them up. You would never recognize a pig in a sausage." This was no consolation to the American public, which foamed at the sprightly invective and caricature in Mrs. Trollope's first book, Domestic Man ners of the Americans. The book was a financial success, but not sufficiently so to relieve the author as she shunted her family to & fro over Europe in an endless flight from moneylenders and hotel bills.