Lewis’s own death was as gothic as anything in his fiction. On board the ship he wrote his will on his servant’s hat. With a macabre gothic touch, his body was put in an improvised coffin which was wrapped in a sheet with weights and dropped overboard; but the weights fell out and the coffin bobbed up on the surface – the sheet acting as a sail in the wind – and floated across the waves back to Jamaica.
FN
Matthew Gregory ‘Monk’ Lewis
MRT
The Monk
Biog
D. L. MacDonald, Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography (2000)
20. Mrs Frances Trollope 1779–1863
If Fanny is remembered at all today, it is as an admittedly courageous and hard-working woman who nevertheless neglected her talented son, and was herself a second-rate writer, a political dilettante and a bit of a snob. Biographer Pamela Neville-Sington, who disagrees with the depiction
Most male novelists have learned to read at their mothers’ knees. Only one comes to mind who learned to write novels from observing his mother. The essence of what we think of as the Trollopian method – early rising, tradesmanlike application to the task, and indomitable ‘cheerfulness’ – can be traced directly to Anthony Trollope’s mother. There is a description in An Autobiography of Mrs Trollope heroically penning her light fiction to keep the wolf from the door, while her children die, one by one, from consumption:
She was at her table at four in the morning, and had finished her work before the world had begun to be aroused … 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 were always forthcoming. The doctor’s vials and the ink-bottle held equal place 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.
The main lines of Fanny Trollope’s life are laid down in the second chapter of An Autobiography – ‘My Mother’. There is no corresponding chapter on ‘My Father’. The sprightly daughter of a West Country clergyman, Frances Milton waited until she was thirty before making a good match with a London barrister. Thomas Anthony Trollope had professional prospects and ‘expectations’ from a rich, unmarried and conveniently antique uncle. The dutiful Mrs Trollope had seven children in ten years (only two were to survive into mature age), while her husband contrived to ruin the family finances buying land, losing briefs and antagonising patrons. The uncle married at the age of sixty-plus and produced heirs as lustily as his nephew. In the crisis of their affairs, in November 1827, Mrs Trollope, aged forty-eight, went off to America for three and a half years. She had in tow her favourite son Henry, two small daughters, a couple of servants, and a young French artist who was devoted to her, Auguste Hervieu. Mr Trollope was not in attendance. Nor was twelve-year-old Anthony.
Mrs Trollope’s first destination in America was an Owenite community, Nashoba, in backwoods Tennessee, founded by her friend, Fanny Wright. What Wright had in mind was a commune in which black and white children would be educated together in a Temple of Science. The Nashoba community also advocated the practice of free or ‘rational’ love, and, less publicly stated, lesbian freedoms. Mrs Trollope’s views on this and other aspects of the Nashoba programme, the degree of her commitment to Owenite ideals, and her precise relationship with Fanny Wright and Hervieu, have been carefully excised from the official record.
Inevitably, the community was a squalid shambles. After ten days and the inevitable rupture with Wright, Mrs Trollope and her brood moved on to Cincinnati. Here she put on dramatic shows and erected a ‘bazaar’ – ‘Trollope’s folly,’ as it came to be called – a kind of proto-shopping mall (the Paris arcades evidently gave her the idea for it). Ironically, the bazaar came close to succeeding. A key factor in its eventual failure was Mrs Trollope’s having affronted her potential clientele, the bourgeois ladies of the town, by living with a French artist away from her husband. She could have been the Donald Trump of her day.
After more than three years in America, Fanny Trollope was fifty-one and broke. She returned to England and published a book – ‘blowing up the Merrikins’, as Tony Weller would say. The gloriously spiteful Domestic Manners of the Americans (they have none) was an 1832 bestseller – in England. Just as profitably, she turned from travel book to fiction, promptly entering the select ranks of the £1,000-a-book authors. Her novels included Tremordyn Cliff (1835), the study of a dominant woman (a character type which was to become Trollope’s trademark); the anti-slavery novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836) – a likely influence on Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the ‘social problem’ novel The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong the Factory Boy (1840); and her fictional attack on the country’s bastardy laws, Jessie Phillips (1843). The work of this ten years is the high point of her career in fiction. It was also the high point in her earning. It was, her son Tom said, as if a fairy godmother had waved her wand over the Trollope household.
With her husband’s death in 1835, Mrs Trollope’s life became easier – though no less industrious. Latching, with cynical speed, on to every fictional fashion that came along and allying herself with huckster publishers (like Henry Colburn), she continued to delight circulating library readers while infuriating the stuffier kind of male critic with her ‘unwomanly’ smartness. Mrs Trollope, wrote the young fogey Thackeray on reading her maliciously anti-evangelical novel, The Vicar of Wrexhill, ‘had much better have remained at home, pudding-making or stocking-making, than have meddled with matters which she understands so ill’.
Having married off her daughter Cecilia (the unfortunate young woman soon died, leaving behind a novel), and launched Anthony into a Civil Service and novel-writing career, finding him his first publisher, Mrs Trollope left in 1844 for villa life in Florence with her older son, Thomas, another part-time novelist. She was sixty-five. Her retirement years were characteristically active. Thomas, his father’s son in more than name, needed the cash. As Anthony recalls, ‘she continued writing up to 1856 when she was 76 years old; – and had at that time produced 114 volumes of which the first was not written till she was 50. 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.’
FN
Frances Trollope (‘Fanny’, née Milton)
MRT
The Vicar of Wrexhill
Biog
Pamela Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman (2003)
21. Thomas De Quincey 1785–1859
Oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for ‘the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel’, bringest an assuaging balm.
What kind of career, in fantasy-literature-land, would Thomas De Quincey have had if he’d been subjected to a twenty-first-century legal system? As a juvenile runaway, living rough on the streets of London, he would have been put into what is laughably called ‘care’. As a grown man with a predilection for underage girls (‘nympholepsy’ he termed it), he might have found himself in prison. As a lifelong abuser of Class A drugs he would have been in and out of court and – in his more raving spells with imaginary crocodiles chasing him through endless Piranesi architecture – he might well have been sectioned. In our enlightened regime, would Thomas De Quincey have left to posterity his acknowledged masterpieces – Confessions of an English Opium-Eater or ‘On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts’? Probably not. He would have been too preoccupied keeping ahead of the long arm of the law and the crossed arms of a straitjacket.
Thomas Quincey (the ‘De’ was a snobbish affectation) was born in Manchester, the son of a prosperous linen merchant who died early, leaving the care of the family to a terrifyingly evangelical mother. Young Thomas was set up for life by the wise provisions of his father’s will. One o
f his missions in life was to waste that money so deliberately that his last decades would be passed in destitute literary hackery. Sent to a good boarding school, he ran away to shack up in Soho with a fifteen-year-old prostitute. He later spent some time at the University of Oxford – but walked out when he discovered that the oral examination was not, as promised, in Greek but English. He learned early that drugs and drop-out alliterate in life, as well as on the page.
While debauching his constitution with opium tablets, washed down with copious draughts of wine, he was stocking his mind. He wrote nothing of significance until he was in his mid-thirties and his mind full to overflowing and boiling with toxins. One toxin in particular has never been so lovingly described: ‘eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure from blood; and to the proud man a brief oblivion for Wrongs undress’d and insults unavenged.’ Even more than opium, he was addicted to Wordsworth. When he was able, he migrated to the Lake District, to be near his literary god. He helped Coleridge with money and Wordsworth himself with child-minding, proof-reading and points of punctuation. He was renowned for his conversation – although after 4 p.m., as J. G. Lockhart observed, it did get rather slurred.
After a decade living among the ‘Lakers’, and having married his young housekeeper, De Quincey drifted back to London. By now he had run through his patrimony and was getting by with grudging handouts from his mother and what he could earn by his pen. It was at this period (around 1822) that he produced the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. It caused a sensation. ‘Better, a thousand times better, die than have anything to do with such a Devil’s own drug!’ expostulated Thomas Carlyle, whose notion of angelic medication was something to ease his chronic constipation. Doctors reported an epidemic of deaths from copy-cat overdoses (murder De Quincey-style), in the same way that Goethe’s Werther had inspired mass suicide among susceptibly adolescent readers.
Writers from Edgar Allan Poe, through Aleister Crowley (the ‘Great Beast’ and author of a hommage, Diary of a Drug Fiend) to W. S. Burroughs and Timothy Leary, have taken their inspiration from De Quincey and his contention that the devil’s own drugs give the imagination wings. The Confessions made him notorious but not, alas, rich. Despite wretched health, and his own poisonous self-medications, he lived to a great age, latterly in Edinburgh, writing all the time, flitting from one lodging to another – filthy ‘even by Scottish standards’, as one visitor tartly recorded.
Is that slippery masterpiece a memoir, an extended ‘essay’ or a novel? It is, whatever the Dewey Decimal system says, the last. If we categorise CEOE properly, it is a Bildungsroman (a self-portrait novel); indeed, a pioneer text in the genre. The point can be made by isolating one of the central episodes in the Confessions.
When, as a seventeen-year-old, Thomas washes up in Oxford Street, ‘squatting’ (as later teenagers would say), he finds companionship with an even younger streetwalker, ‘Ann’. They cuddle at night for warmth and, we apprehend, sex. It is a powerful element in the narrative: but is it ‘chronicle’ or ‘plot’? Just prior to his return to decent society, the hero loses contact with her:
Meantime, what had become of poor Ann? For her I have reserved my concluding words. According to our agreement, I sought her daily, and waited for her every night, so long as I stayed in London, at the corner of Titchfield Street … The street where she had lodged I knew, but not the house … If she lived, doubtless we must have been some time in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps even within a few feet of each other – a barrier no wider than a London street often amounting in the end to a separation for eternity!
If she lived, indeed. De Quincey’s most recent biographer is inclined to think Ann as fictional as Keats’s Belle Dame. To think so, of course, is to transmute the fabric of De Quincey’s narrative: De Quincey should be reshelved as one of our great novelists.
FN
Thomas Penson De Quincey
MRT
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Biog
R. Morrison, The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey (2009)
22. James Fenimore Cooper 1789–1851
One day America will be as beautiful in actuality as it is in Cooper. Not yet, however. When the factories have fallen down again. D. H. Lawrence
James Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey. His father was a Federalist congressman, the family background Quaker. Soon after James’s birth the Coopers (along with their thirteen children) moved to Cooperstown, New York, a village owned, founded and – given the size of his brood – largely populated by Cooper Sr. The family home was surrounded by a vast estate whose wilderness was, by this date (1790), cleared of Indians. But the memory of them remained – not least in the name of Cooperstown’s neighbouring Lake Otsego.
James went to Yale aged thirteen (normal at the time) and was dismissed for some innocuous horseplay in 1805. His most serious offence is recorded to have been training a donkey to sit in a professor’s chair. Donkeyplay. In 1806, the wild student was sent to sea by his father, with a view to making a man of him. A long career in the US Navy was foreseen. He rose to the rank of midshipman before resigning in 1811. He married in the same year. The couple would have seven children and for the rest of his life Cooper would be a landlubber.
For several years, Cooper was able to live as a gentleman farmer with the $50,000 he inherited from his father on his death in 1809. He allegedly began his career in bestselling fiction in disgust after reading one of Mrs Amelia Opie’s homiletic tales aloud to his wife in 1820. Maintaining that he could do better himself, he turned out the Opie-ish Precaution (1820), a moral tale instructing parents how to take better care of their offspring. The work was put out as supposedly by an English author, with an English setting. It flopped. However, it is more likely that Cooper was persuaded to turn his hand to fiction by financial need. He had, by 1820, run through his considerable patrimony.
Cooper hit his stride with his second work, The Spy (1821), a story with an ultra-American theme. It sold 10,000 copies within the year and was hailed in some quarters as the most successful American novel hitherto produced in the young Republic. There was a general feeling that America needed its Walter Scott. The Spy was the first of nine novels dealing with the American past in the crucial years before, during and after the Revolution. Cooper was creating a popular history for the nation – as Scott had done for his nation. The Spy drew on American chauvinism following the 1812 naval victory over Britain. Set in the period of Revolution, it is played out on the so-called ‘neutral ground’ between the British and American forces in New York state. The debt to Waverley is manifest.
The Pilot (1824) was initially devised as an old salt’s yarn, to correct landlubberly errors in Scott’s The Pirate (1822) – errors which Scott candidly confessed. Cooper was a great corrector of other novelists’ work. He was also a great innovator and The Pilot was the progenitor of the line of nautical fiction subsequently exploited by ‘Captain’ Marryat in England and by Herman Melville in the US – neither of whom needed any correction from James Fenimore Cooper on maritime matters. The novel’s titular hero was the country’s greatest sailor (and victor over the British at sea), John Paul Jones.
Cooper’s most influential ‘national tales’ were the sequence novels which began with The Pioneers (1823). This tale introduces the series hero, Leatherstocking, and chronicles the nation-building forces that drive him, as a ‘pioneer’, ever westward with the receding ‘frontier’, bringing destruction and civilisation in his wake. The name is taken from the deerskin leggings worn by the frontiersman hero – variously (and confusingly) called Leatherstocking, Natty Bumppo, Pathfinder, Trapper and Deerslayer. A ‘scout’, he has the skills of the redskin and the superior intellect of the paleface. He can merge with both peoples – even when they are at wa
r.
In 1826, Cooper published the second of the Leatherstocking novels, The Last of the Mohicans. Subtitled ‘A Narrative of 1757’, it was designed to cash in on the 50th anniversary of the Revolution. The novel is a lament for the indigenous inhabitants of New York State and publication coincided with the decisive phase of the Indian Removal Policy. Rarely has racial extinction been portrayed more beautifully than in the Liebestod of Uncas and Cora. The popularity of the Leatherstocking romances triggered a ‘Coopermania’ in Europe and Britain. The novelist crossed the Atlantic to exploit his popularity, settling there with his family from July 1826 to September 1833. On his return, Cooper produced numerous volumes of travel, historical writing and novels, prominent among which was The Prairie (1827), the third Leatherstocking instalment. The frontier has now reached the Western Plains, and the early nineteenth century.
In 1837 Cooper, always quarrelsome, embarked on a ‘war’ with the local Whig press, firing off a barrage of libel suits and raising some useful money for himself in the process. The Pathfinder (1840) was the fourth in the now epic Leatherstocking series. Mercedes of Castile, produced in the same year, a story of Columbus’s epic voyage of discovery, is generally regarded as Cooper’s worst effort in fiction – although there are other candidates for that title. The Deerslayer (1841) brought the Leatherstocking saga to a conclusion. However, the series was not chronologically sequential and it is in The Prairie that Natty, now eighty (but still a dead-shot with his fearsome long carbine, Killdeer) finally exits. It is not the least of Cooper’s achievements that he inspired the funniest critique in American literature, Mark Twain’s ‘Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses’.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 11