Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration

Settlers, Returnees, and Nineteenth-Century Literature in English

Tamara S Wagner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472467065
• eBook ISBN: 9781317002161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into its service. The exportation of characters at the end of a novel indisputably formed a convenient narrative solution that at once mirrored and exaggerated public policies about so-called 'superfluous' or 'redundant' parts of society. Yet the very convenience of such pat endings was increasingly called into question. New starts overseas might not be so easily realizable; emigration destinations failed to live up to the inflated promises of pro-emigration rhetoric; the 'unwanted' might make a surprising reappearance. Wagner juxtaposes representations of emigration in the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Yonge with Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian settler fiction by Elizabeth Murray, Clara Cheeseman, and Susanna Moodie, offering a new literary history not just of nineteenth-century migration, but also of transoceanic exchanges and genre formation.

1 Failure into Fiction

Frances Trollope and Susanna Moodie

DOI: 10.4324/9781315548289-2

‘The Great Transatlantic Subject': Frances Trollope's American Novels

Upon its publication in 1832, Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans instantaneously became one of the most popular and controversial British travel accounts of the ‘lost’ or ‘renegade’ colony in North America. Generating intense reactions on both sides of the Atlantic, the book's notoriety was to influence transatlantic relations for decades. ‘To trollopize’ became a recognized verb in the English language that meant ‘to abuse the American nation’ or, in America, ‘to be satirical about one's experiences’.¹ No wonder that Susanna Moodie, in her autobiographical account of emigration to Canada in the 1830s, Roughing It in the Bush, recorded prejudices against British authors abroad with a characteristic ambivalence: ‘Authors and literary people they held in supreme detestation; and I was told by a lady the very first time I appeared in company, that “she heard that I wrote books, but she could tell me that they did not want a Mrs Trollope in Canada”.’² Moodie sympathized with Trollope without either having known her or read her work. The hostility with which the English writer was regarded was enough to secure Moodie's support:

I had not then read Mrs Trollope's work on America, or I should have comprehended at once the cause of [a neighbouring settler's] indignation; for she was just such a person as would have drawn forth the keen satire of that far-seeing observer of the absurdities of our nature, whose witty exposure of American affectation has done more towards producing a reform in that respect, than would have resulted from a thousand grave animadversions soberly written.³

Moodie was an unwilling emigrant, although this has not prevented her descriptions of settler life from being canonized as influential nineteenth-century Canadian works.⁴ In pointed contrast, Trollope first came to America in 1827, full of enthusiasm, inspired by a mixture of political idealism and the hope to replenish the family's finances. Disappointed by the experimental model community Frances Wright had attempted to set up at Nashoba, Tennessee – a disappointment capped by the subsequent failure of Trollope's own business enterprises – she instead landed a success with her notoriously acerbic account of the Americans’ ‘domestic manners’.

Trollope's American experience was to exert a formative influence on her writing. She had not come out as a feted celebrity, as Dickens was to do, nor was she an emigrating writer regarded with suspicion like Moodie. If America cannot be said to have made her an author – at least not in the sense that Moodie was to become one of Canada's canonical settler writers – her return home did. It was not only that Trollope's successful repackaging of her personal journals prompted her to take up writing as a profession. Her series of disappointments entailed shifts in ideological affiliations that, in turn, informed her ambiguous treatment of the English abroad as well as of foreign lands and customs. She was possibly the first to write domestic satire set both in Australia and America, sending her most unscrupulous anti-heroine, the serial widow Mrs Barnaby, on these transoceanic migrations. In presenting ‘English colonies’ – a term often applied to enclaves of self-exiled expatriates in continental Europe as well – just as satirically, she moreover extended her critique of republicanism to European nations. Shortly after her return from America in 1831, Trollope remarked that she might have gone out as ‘a bit of a radical . . . but the United States offer[ed] a radical cure for this’.⁵ Still, it would be too simple to say that she ‘left England something of a liberal’, but ‘returned home very much a conservative’.⁶ Political or religious fanaticism and hypocrisy of any kind were to remain a main target of her predominantly satirical depictions of society at home and abroad.

Trollope produced travel accounts of the various countries she lived in or travelled through until her death in Florence, Italy, in 1863. However, whereas Paris and the Parisians in 1835 (1836) and Vienna and the Austrians (1838) are self-consciously conservative, Trollope continued to shuttle between divergent ideological conceptions and their criticism in her fiction.⁷ As Clare Cotugno has pointedly put it, Trollope was ‘unafraid to contemplate national and international politics and unafraid to change her mind’, repeatedly utilizing developments overseas as object lessons, while ‘amus[ing] British readers with descriptions of the foreign milieu’.⁸ As she returned, again and again, to failed emigration as a central theme and an extended metaphor for political and social conflicts at home, she did much to popularize the usage of ‘transatlantic’, while refining and redefining the term ‘European’ as its meaning shifted abroad.⁹ Like her son Anthony, whose writing is often said to have been directly influenced by her fiction, as well as Dickens, who initially tried to disprove her negative perceptions of the United States,¹⁰ she undoubtedly vented her personal frustration both in sharply critical travel accounts and in fiction. Yet in the course of her writing, she also engendered some of the most intricate engagements with stereotypes she had largely created herself. At once contributing to and critically complicating prevalent clichés, her works played a crucial role in the formation of transatlantic cultural exchanges.

Trollope is almost exclusively remembered for her travel writing. Domestic Manners initiated her successful career as a popular author and had an important influence on the representation of America in nineteenth-century British literature. Its cultural impact, however, has unfortunately ensured that her ‘American novels’ have primarily been considered – or dismissed – as little more than fictionalized versions of her first travel book. In order truly to appreciate how Trollope translated her overseas experience across genre paradigms, it is essential to reassess her self-conscious turns and returns to familiar ‘plots’: the fraudulent plots of American and British speculators; the plots of land that emigrants seek to occupy in the promising New World; the changing plots also of popular British fiction about this ‘renegade family member’ or ‘rebellious offspring, the United States’.¹¹ Before exploring the attendant genre shifts, I first briefly recount the most impactful circumstances and incidents of Trollope's stay in the United States. After then situating her novels squarely within the quickly clichéd recourse to America, Americans, and specifically, American speculations in nineteenth-century British writing, I shall show how Trollope participated in this stereotyping. While she created some of the most popular and lasting images, her ongoing recycling of her material also generated self-ironic reworkings. They did not just address issues of transatlantic travel and emigration, but negotiated the very processes of writing about and marketing these topical concerns.

Trollope's failure in the United States as a potential emigrant and a business woman did more than just cure her belief in ‘American’ ways of replenishing the family coffers. Fortune-seeking forays abroad could prove ruinous, even fatal. Throughout her writing on emigration, unreasonable expectations are faulted for the resulting disappointment. Yet financial swindles also turn out to be so rampant in the renegade colony that their condemnation issues a powerful warning of the dangers such developments could mean at home. This twofold caution against speculative society (on either side of the Atlantic) transcends specific political critiques or cultural stereotyping. Recurring repeatedly to American speculations and speculators nevertheless provides a means to settle outstanding accounts with the scenes of the Trollopes’ financial failure. Trollope is certainly never shy of putting monetary concerns firmly in the foreground. American commercial rapacity may generally feature in nineteenth-century British publications, but for Trollope, its exposure is overtly and unashamedly caught up in financially driven counter-schemes on the part of her English characters. What I explore here is the sheer spectrum of her recycling of American material and the impact this increasingly complex process had on the literary representation as well as the larger cultural perceptions of transatlantic relationships in Victorian Britain.

Unlike most British travel writers, Trollope had herself endeavoured and disastrously failed to settle, however temporarily, in the United States. In 1827, she embarked on an enterprise that was to prove an unexpected influence on her future career. Faced with financial difficulties caused by disappointed expectations of a possible inheritance,¹² she took her younger children and ventured overseas to join Frances Wright's utopian settlement in America, at first leaving her insolvent husband behind. She had met Wright in Paris and was enticed by ‘[o]‌ne of [Wright's] pet schemes’, an experimental community dedicated to the education and emancipation of freed slaves. Trollope also hoped her son Henry might find employment – a ‘hope [that] went down in the general flood of disappointment which overwhelmed the English family when they saw the settlement’, as her daughter-in-law, Frances Eleanor Trollope, pointedly put it in A Memoir of Frances Trollope (1895).¹³ The first sight of Nashoba was to become emblematic of failed settlements:

one glance sufficed to convince me, that every idea I had formed of the place was as far as possible from the truth. Desolation was the only feeling – the only word that presented itself; but it was not spoken. I think, however, that Miss Wright was aware of the painful impression the sight of her forest-home produced on me, and I doubt not that the conviction reached us both at the same moment, that we had erred in thinking that a few months passed together at this spot could be productive of pleasure to either. But to do her justice, I believe her mind was so exclusively occupied by the object she had then in view, that all things else were worthless, or indifferent to her. I never heard or read of any enthusiasm approaching hers, except in some few instances, in ages past, of religious fanaticism.¹⁴

The account of this unspeakable sense of disappointment is almost laconic, informed by a tone of resignation. Ironic understatements hint at a satirical potential that is only fully realized in subsequent fictional versions. All is desolation, the destruction of various hopes, the demolition of the would-be settler's and would-be idealist's castles-in-the-air.

Disappointed in the experimental settlement, Trollope next attempted to establish a ‘bazaar’ for imported European goods in the already booming town of Cincinnati. Arguably ‘America's first shopping mall’,¹⁵ it widely became known as ‘Trollope's Folly’.¹⁶ In the Memoir, Frances Eleanor Trollope dismissively described its failure as the result of Mr Trollope's disastrous decision ‘to invest the last remnant of his capital in a speculation at Cincinnati’ once he came out to join his wife.¹⁷ No matter whether the guilt can really be so easily projected onto Trollope's chronically impecunious husband, or whether the bazaar was exclusively her own idea that (its nearly ruinous failure notwithstanding) introduced something new and strikingly modern into the developing ex-colony, the ‘disastrous speculation’ came to epitomize ‘the disappointment of all their hopes’: ‘the capital embarked in it might as well – for all the benefit the Trollope family ever derived from it – have been thrown into the Atlantic Ocean’.¹⁸ Transatlantic movement swallowed up not just the last financial resources, but every resource of enthusiasm for new settlements.

From the 1895 Memoir onwards, the family's resultant struggles have regularly been evoked as ‘a tragicomedy of failed business ventures, scandal, and illness’, a tragicomedy Trollope was to turn ‘to good effect in her Domestic Manners’.¹⁹ As a successful speculation on the book market, this unusual travel book – unusual in that it foregrounded personal, domestic experience²⁰ – certainly replenished the family coffers, and thus, indirectly, the American venture did pay off after all. Its success furthermore initiated a steady recourse to such personal distress in a series of novels that likewise helped to keep her family afloat financially. This fortuitous recuperation of financial failure in the form of a literary speculation, however, has tended to obscure the mixture of ideologically driven enthusiasm, calculative business mentality, and financial desperation that had brought them out in the first place. Initially, Trollope's record of daily life in America had not been collected for publication. She did no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Failing to Settle in the Victorian Novel
• 1 Failure into Fiction: Frances Trollope and Susanna Moodie
• 2 Charles Dickens’s Anti-Emigration Plots
• 3 Wilkie Collins’s Sensational Returnees
• 4 No Exotic Ends in Charlotte Yonge
• 5 Homecoming in Nineteenth-Century Settler Novels: Elizabeth Murray and Clara Cheeseman
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index