MY MOTHER.
Though I do not wish in these pages to go back to the origin of all
the Trollopes, I must say a few words of my mother,--partly because
filial duty will not allow me to be silent as to a parent who made
for herself a considerable name in the literature of her day, and
partly because there were circumstances in her career well worthy
of notice. She was the daughter of the Rev. William Milton, vicar
of Heckfield, who, as well as my father, had been a fellow of New
College. She was nearly thirty when, in 1809, she married my father.
Six or seven years ago a bundle of love-letters from her to him fell
into my hand in a very singular way, having been found in the house
of a stranger, who, with much courtesy, sent them to me. They were
then about sixty years old, and had been written some before and some
after her marriage, over the space of perhaps a year. In no novel
of Richardson's or Miss Burney's have I seen a correspondence at
the same time so sweet, so graceful, and so well expressed. But the
marvel of these letters was in the strange difference they bore to
the love-letters of the present day. They are, all of them, on square
paper, folded and sealed, and addressed to my father on circuit; but
the language in each, though it almost borders on the romantic, is
beautifully chosen, and fit, without change of a syllable, for the
most critical eye. What girl now studies the words with which she
shall address her lover, or seeks to charm him with grace of diction?
She dearly likes a little slang, and revels in the luxury of entire
familiarity with a new and strange being. There is something in that,
too, pleasant to our thoughts, but I fear that this phase of life
does not conduce to a taste for poetry among our girls. Though my
mother was a writer of prose, and revelled in satire, the poetic
feeling clung to her to the last.
In the first ten years of her married life she became the mother of
six children, four of whom died of consumption at different ages.
My elder sister married, and had children, of whom one still lives;
but she was one of the four who followed each other at intervals
during my mother's lifetime. Then my brother Tom and I were left to
her,--with the destiny before us three of writing more books than
were probably ever before produced by a single family.[2] My married
sister added to the number by one little anonymous high church story,
called _Chollerton_.
[Footnote 2: The family of Estienne, the great French printers
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of whom there were
at least nine or ten, did more perhaps for the production of
literature than any other family. But they, though they edited,
and not unfrequently translated the works which they published,
were not authors in the ordinary sense.]
From the date of their marriage up to 1827, when my mother went to
America, my father's affairs had always been going down in the world.
She had loved society, affecting a somewhat liberal _rôle_, and
professing an emotional dislike to tyrants, which sprung from the
wrongs of would-be regicides and the poverty of patriot exiles. An
Italian marquis who had escaped with only a second shirt from the
clutches of some archduke whom he had wished to exterminate, or a
French _prolétaire_ with distant ideas of sacrificing himself to
the cause of liberty, were always welcome to the modest hospitality
of her house. In after years, when marquises of another caste had
been gracious to her, she became a strong Tory, and thought that
archduchesses were sweet. But with her politics were always an affair
of the heart,--as, indeed, were all her convictions. Of reasoning
from causes, I think that she knew nothing. Her heart was in every
way so perfect, her desire to do good to all around her so thorough,
and her power of self-sacrifice so complete, that she generally
got herself right in spite of her want of logic; but it must be
acknowledged that she was emotional. I can remember now her books,
and can see her at her pursuits. The poets she loved best were Dante
and Spenser. But she raved also of him of whom all such ladies
were raving then, and rejoiced in the popularity and wept over the
persecution of Lord Byron. She was among those who seized with
avidity on the novels, as they came out, of the then unknown Scott,
and who could still talk of the triumphs of Miss Edgeworth. With the
literature of the day she was familiar, and with the poets of the
past. Of other reading I do not think she had mastered much. Her
life, I take it, though latterly clouded by many troubles, was easy,
luxurious, and idle, till my father's affairs and her own aspirations
sent her to America. She had dear friends among literary people, of
whom I remember Mathias, Henry Milman, and Miss Landon; but till long
after middle life she never herself wrote a line for publication.
In 1827 she went to America, having been partly instigated by the
social and communistic ideas of a lady whom I well remember,--a
certain Miss Wright,--who was, I think, the first of the American
female lecturers. Her chief desire, however, was to establish my
brother Henry; and perhaps joined with that was the additional object
of breaking up her English home without pleading broken fortunes
to all the world. At Cincinnati, in the State of Ohio, she built a
bazaar, and I fancy lost all the money which may have been embarked
in that speculation. It could not have been much, and I think that
others also must have suffered. But she looked about her, at her
American cousins, and resolved to write a book about them. This book
she brought back with her in 1831, and published it early in 1832.
When she did this she was already fifty. When doing this she was
aware that unless she could so succeed in making money, there was
no money for any of the family. She had never before earned a
shilling. She almost immediately received a considerable sum from the
publishers,--if I remember rightly, amounting to two sums of £400
each within a few months; and from that moment till nearly the time
of her death, at any rate for more than twenty years, she was in the
receipt of a considerable income from her writings. It was a late age
at which to begin such a career.
_The Domestic Manners of the Americans_ was the first of a series
of books of travels, of which it was probably the best, and was
certainly the best known. It will not be too much to say of it that
it had a material effect upon the manners of the Americans of the
day, and that that effect has been fully appreciated by them. No
observer was certainly ever less qualified to judge of the prospects
or even of the happiness of a young people. No one could have been
worse adapted by nature for the task of learning whether a nation
was in a way to thrive. Whatever she saw she judged, as most women
do, from her own standing-point. If a thing were ugly to her eyes,
it ought to be ugly to all eyes,--and if ugly, it must be bad. What
though people had plenty to eat and clothes to wear, if they put
their feet upon the tables and did not reverence their betters? The
Americans were to her rough, uncouth, and vulgar,--and she told them
so. Those communistic and social ideas, which had been so pretty in
a drawing-room, were scattered to the winds. Her volumes were very
bitter; but they were very clever, and they saved the family from
ruin.
Book followed book immediately,--first two novels, and then a book on
Belgium and Western Germany. She refurnished the house which I have
called Orley Farm, and surrounded us again with moderate comforts. Of
the mixture of joviality and industry which formed her character, it
is almost impossible to speak with exaggeration. The industry was a
thing apart, kept to herself. It was not necessary that any one who
lived with her should see it. She was at her table at four in the
morning, and had finished her work before the world had begun to be
aroused. But the joviality was all for others. She could dance with
other people's legs, eat and drink with other people's palates, be
proud with the lustre of other people's finery. Every mother can do
that for her own daughters; but she could do it for any girl whose
look, and voice, and manners pleased her. Even when she was at work,
the laughter of those she loved was a pleasure to her. She had much,
very much, to suffer. Work sometimes came hard to her, so much being
required,--for she was extravagant, and liked to have money to spend;
but of all people I have known she was the most joyous, or, at any
rate, the most capable of joy.
We continued this renewed life at Harrow for nearly two years, during
which I was still at the school, and at the end of which I was nearly
nineteen. Then there came a great catastrophe. My father, who, when
he was well, lived a sad life among his monks and nuns, still kept a
horse and gig. One day in March, 1834, just as it had been decided
that I should leave the school then, instead of remaining, as had
been intended, till midsummer, I was summoned very early in the
morning, to drive him up to London. He had been ill, and must still
have been very ill indeed when he submitted to be driven by any one.
It was not till we had started that he told me that I was to put him
on board the Ostend boat. This I did, driving him through the city
down to the docks. It was not within his nature to be communicative,
and to the last he never told me why he was going to Ostend.
Something of a general flitting abroad I had heard before, but why he
should have flown the first, and flown so suddenly, I did not in the
least know till I returned. When I got back with the gig, the house
and furniture were all in the charge of the sheriff's officers.
The gardener who had been with us in former days stopped me as I
drove up the road, and with gestures, signs, and whispered words,
gave me to understand that the whole affair--horse, gig, and
harness--would be made prize of if I went but a few yards farther.
Why they should not have been made prize of I do not know. The little
piece of dishonest business which I at once took in hand and carried
through successfully was of no special service to any of us. I
drove the gig into the village, and sold the entire equipage to the
ironmonger for £17, the exact sum which he claimed as being due to
himself. I was much complimented by the gardener, who seemed to think
that so much had been rescued out of the fire. I fancy that the
ironmonger was the only gainer by my smartness.
When I got back to the house a scene of devastation was in progress,
which still was not without its amusement. My mother, through
her various troubles, had contrived to keep a certain number of
pretty-pretties which were dear to her heart. They were not much, for
in those days the ornamentation of houses was not lavish as it is
now; but there was some china, and a little glass, a few books, and
a very moderate supply of household silver. These things, and things
like them, were being carried down surreptitiously, through a gap
between the two gardens, on to the premises of our friend Colonel
Grant. My two sisters, then sixteen and seventeen, and the Grant
girls, who were just younger, were the chief marauders. To such
forces I was happy to add myself for any enterprise, and between us
we cheated the creditors to the extent of our powers, amidst the
anathemas, but good-humoured abstinence from personal violence, of
the men in charge of the property. I still own a few books that were
thus purloined.
For a few days the whole family bivouacked under the Colonel's
hospitable roof, cared for and comforted by that dearest of all
women, his wife. Then we followed my father to Belgium, and
established ourselves in a large house just outside the walls of
Bruges. At this time, and till my father's death, everything was
done with money earned by my mother. She now again furnished the
house,--this being the third that she had put in order since she
came back from America two years and a half ago.
There were six of us went into this new banishment. My brother Henry
had left Cambridge and was ill. My younger sister was ill. And though
as yet we hardly told each other that it was so, we began to feel
that that desolating fiend, consumption, was among us. My father was
broken-hearted as well as ill, but whenever he could sit at his table
he still worked at his ecclesiastical records. My elder sister and I
were in good health, but I was an idle, desolate hanger-on, that most
hopeless of human beings, a hobbledehoy of nineteen, without any idea
of a career, or a profession, or a trade. As well as I can remember
I was fairly happy, for there were pretty girls at Bruges with whom
I could fancy that I was in love; and I had been removed from the
real misery of school. But as to my future life I had not even an
aspiration. Now and again there would arise a feeling that it was
hard upon my mother that she should have to do so much for us, that
we should be idle while she was forced to work so constantly; but we
should probably have thought more of that had she not taken to work
as though it were the recognised condition of life for an old lady of
fifty-five.
Then, by degrees, an established sorrow was at home among us. My
brother was an invalid, and the horrid word, which of all words were
for some years after the most dreadful to us, had been pronounced.
It was no longer a delicate chest, and some temporary necessity for
peculiar care,--but consumption! The Bruges doctor had said so, and
we knew that he was right. From that time forth my mother's most
visible occupation was that of nursing. There were two sick men in
the house, and hers were the hands that tended them. The novels went
on, of course. We had already learned to know that they would be
forthcoming at stated intervals,--and they always were forthcoming.
The doctor's vials and the ink-bottle held equal places in my
mother's rooms. I have written many novels under many circumstances;
but I doubt much whether I could write one when my whole heart was by
the bedside of a dying son. Her power of dividing herself into two
parts, and keeping her intellect by itself clear from the troubles of
the world, and fit for the duty it had to do, I never saw equalled. I
do not think that the writing of a novel is the most difficult task
which a man may be called upon to do; but it is a task that may be
supposed to demand a spirit fairly at ease. The work of doing it with
a troubled spirit killed Sir Walter Scott. My mother went through it
unscathed in strength, though she performed all the work of day-nurse
and night-nurse to a sick household;--for there were soon three of
them dying.
At this time there came from some quarter an offer to me of a
commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment; and so it was apparently
my destiny to be a soldier. But I must first learn German and French,
of which languages I knew almost nothing. For this a year was allowed
me, and in order that it might be accomplished without expense, I
undertook the duties of a classical usher to a school then kept by
William Drury at Brussels. Mr. Drury had been one of the masters at
Harrow when I went there at seven years old, and is now, after an
interval of fifty-three years, even yet officiating as clergyman at
that place.[3] To Brussels I went, and my heart still sinks within
me as I reflect that any one should have intrusted to me the tuition
of thirty boys. I can only hope that those boys went there to learn
French, and that their parents were not particular as to their
classical acquirements. I remember that on two occasions I was sent
to take the school out for a walk; but that after the second attempt
Mrs. Drury declared that the boys' clothes would not stand any
further experiments of that kind. I cannot call to mind any learning
by me of other languages; but as I only remained in that position for
six weeks, perhaps the return lessons had not been as yet commenced.
At the end of the six weeks a letter reached me, offering me a
clerkship in the General Post Office, and I accepted it. Among my
mother's dearest friends she reckoned Mrs. Freeling, the wife of
Clayton Freeling, whose father, Sir Francis Freeling, then ruled the
Post Office. She had heard of my desolate position, and had begged
from her father-in-law the offer of a berth in his own office.
[Footnote 3: He died two years after these words were written.]
I hurried back from Brussels to Bruges on my way to London, and
found that the number of invalids had been increased. My younger
sister, Emily, who, when I had left the house, was trembling on the
balance,--who had been pronounced to be delicate, but with that
false-tongued hope which knows the truth, but will lie lest the heart
should faint, had been called delicate, but only delicate,--was now
ill. Of course she was doomed. I knew it of both of them, though I
had never heard the word spoken, or had spoken it to any one. And my
father was very ill,--ill to dying, though I did not know it. And my
mother had decreed to send my elder sister away to England, thinking
that the vicinity of so much sickness might be injurious to her. All
this happened late in the autumn of 1834, in the spring of which
year we had come to Bruges; and then my mother was left alone in
a big house outside the town, with two Belgian women-servants, to
nurse these dying patients--the patients being her husband and
children--and to write novels for the sustenance of the family!
It was about this period of her career that her best novels were
written.
To my own initiation at the Post Office I will return in the next
chapter. Just before Christmas my brother died, and was buried at
Bruges. In the following February my father died, and was buried
alongside of him,--and with him died that tedious task of his,
which I can only hope may have solaced many of his latter hours. I
sometimes look back, meditating for hours together, on his adverse
fate. He was a man, finely educated, of great parts, with immense
capacity for work, physically strong very much beyond the average of
men, addicted to no vices, carried off by no pleasures, affectionate
by nature, most anxious for the welfare of his children, born to fair
fortunes,--who, when he started in the world, may be said to have had
everything at his feet. But everything went wrong with him. The touch
of his hand seemed to create failure. He embarked in one hopeless
enterprise after another, spending on each all the money he could at
the time command. But the worse curse to him of all was a temper so
irritable that even those whom he loved the best could not endure it.
We were all estranged from him, and yet I believe that he would have
given his heart's blood for any of us. His life as I knew it was one
long tragedy.
After his death my mother moved to England, and took and furnished a
small house at Hadley, near Barnet. I was then a clerk in the London
Post Office, and I remember well how gay she made the place with
little dinners, little dances, and little picnics, while she herself
was at work every morning long before others had left their beds. But
she did not stay at Hadley much above a year. She went up to London,
where she again took and furnished a house, from which my remaining
sister was married and carried away into Cumberland. My mother soon
followed her, and on this occasion did more than take a house. She
bought a bit of land,--a field of three acres near the town,--and
built a residence for herself. This, I think, was in 1841, and she
had thus established and re-established herself six times in ten
years. But in Cumberland she found the climate too severe, and in
1844 she moved herself to Florence, where she remained till her death
in 1863. She continued writing up to 1856, when she was seventy-six
years old,--and had at that time produced 114 volumes, of which the
first was not written till she was fifty. Her career offers great
encouragement to those who have not begun early in life, but are
still ambitious to do something before they depart hence.
She was an unselfish, affectionate, and most industrious woman,
with great capacity for enjoyment and high physical gifts. She was
endowed too, with much creative power, with considerable humour, and
a genuine feeling for romance. But she was neither clear-sighted nor
accurate; and in her attempts to describe morals, manners, and even
facts, was unable to avoid the pitfalls of exaggeration.