The Signora Neroni decides she will not be seen moving about as a cripple, but only arrayed in all her beauty, Madame Recamier-like, upon sofas. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she writes innumerable sprightly letters from her couch. Also poetry in Italian, Novels in French. Bishop and Mrs Proudie summon the Stanhope family to dinner at the Palace. La Signora Neroni writes to Mr Slope expaining the need for the sofa. Which is accordingly placed in the large drawingroom at the top of the stairs. The bishop sits on it, is warned by his wife it is for a certain lady, his daughter, tittering, telling him the lady in question has no legs. Then 'La Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni' is announced. She is brought in head first, garbed in white velevet and pearls, and scarlet silk, by servants and siblings. Bishop Proudie, in conversation with Madeline's insufferable brother, Ethelbert, struggles to get around the sofa, his way blocked by a fat rector. Ethelbert attempts to help matters by pushing the sofa farther from the wall. But the rector has been leaning upon it and it now shoots away into the middle of the large drawing-room, where its castor caught up Mrs Proudie's

lace train, and carried away there is no saying how much of her garniture. Gathers were heard to go, stitches to crack, plaits to fly open, flounces were seen to fall, and breadths to expose themselves - a long ruin of rent lace disfigured the carpet, and still clung to the vile wheel on which the sofa moved . . . 'Oh you idiot, Bertie!' said the signora, seeing what had been done, and what were to be the consequences. . . . 'Unhand it, sir|' said Mrs Proudie. . . . 'Unhand it, sir! said Mrs Proudie, with redoubled emphasis, . . .  'Unhand it, sir!', she almost screamed.

*

     























She published Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw or Life on the Mississippi in 1835. Already she had become famous for her Domestic Manners of the Americans, 1832. This first book she wrote to pay the family's debts. In it she describes Fanny Wright's Nashoba as a place of utter desolation, no schooling happening at all. Eventually Fanny Wright would ship these slaves to the free Republic of Haiti.



Fanny Trollope and her household travelled on to Cincinnati where she set up a Museum and a Bazaar. Hervieu set to work on a huge canvas on General Lafayette Landing in Cincinnati. While there she commissioned a young part Native American genius, named Hiram Powers, to sculpt Dante's Commedia in waxworks. We shall meet Hiram Powers again in this talk.

She did not like America. People spat tobacco into spittoons everywhere. She loathed slavery. She also disliked American sexual segregation.



On her way home she also visited Niagara and Philadelphia. In Philadelphia she describes being allowed, during the Ladies Only Hour, to see plaster casts of nude statues. Here we see the Trollope's maid, Hester Rust, Fanny and her daughter Cecilia gazing at us! Or at least at Hervieu!



The family then returned home to England. In the late 1830s early 1840s Lord Ashley was preparing the groundwork for Parliamentary legislation against the abusive labour of children in factories and mines in England. He had asked Fanny to investigate and what she saw filled her with horror. Slave-owners did not kill or maim their slaves, keeping them alive. Factory and mine owners treated their child employees as expendable. Fanny saw conditions in England for English children as demonstrably worse than for slaves on American plantations. Requested by Lord Ashley to write in support of his work for children in factories and mines, she published The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, Factory Boy, in 1840. She and Hervieu actually travelled to the milltowns and she and he together witnessed the most terrible scene in the book, where the starving children working in the mill steal from the pigs their swill.






FANNY IN FLORENCE

Thomas Adolphus Trollope decided on setting up housekeeping in Florence with his mother, soon marrying the young Theodosia Garrow, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's tuberculor friend from her Torquay days. He acquired Villino Trollope, the corner building looking onto Florence's largest square, the Maria Antonia, now the Piazza Independenza. Here we see Thomas Adolphus, his now very aged mother, Fanny Trollope, his little daughter, Bice, for Beatrice, and the exotic Theodosia.



Both would die young and Thomas would marry Bice's governess, Dickens' mistress's sister. Villino Trollope was sold, but continued for many years as a boarding house, especially for writers, George Eliot writing much of Romola here, and Thomas Hardy, Tess of the Durbervilles.

We have five members of the Trollope household with us in Florence's Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery, Fanny, Theodosia, her father, Joseph Garrow, his stepdaughter, Harriet Fisher, and their much-loved maid, Elizabeth Shinner. The 'English' Cemetery, Florence's 'God's Acre' for foreigners, where Fanny Trollope was laid to rest, is a nodal place, its monuments celebrating the writers of books, the sculptors of statues, who hated slavery and child abuse with a passion and who all interconnect. Fanny wrote the first anti-slave novel with Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, the American Richard Hildreth wrote the second one, The Slave, publishing it within six months of hers. Hildreth is buried near his fellow Unitarian Theodore Parker. Parker had preached so passionately against slavery that Frederick Douglass, who liked to visit the tombs of famed Abolitionists, came straight from the railroad station to it.

    


Lord Ashley, who became Lord Shaftesbury, worked with Southwood Smith on this campaign. Southwood Smith came to be buried here, his medallion bust sculpted by Joel Hart, the American. On that team was also Richard Hengist Horne, who later emigrated to Australia. He engaged Elizabeth Barrett Browning to work with him on A New Spirit of the Age. The first essay in the collection is a full length study of Southwood Smith who advocated the use of fresh air and sunlight and slum clearance and who came to be buried in Florence's 'English' Cemetery under a fine obelisk. Other essays in that two volume collection included those on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth, Fanny Trollope. Most of these were accompanied by signed portrait engravings. Elizabeth had those of Browning and Tennyson framed and placed on her Wimpole Street mantelpiece. She proposed marriage to both of them, not having met either of them, in her Lady Geraldine's Courtship. Robert accepted and whenever he came a'courting she instructed her brothers to turn both portraits to the wall. Later, she would bring those framed engravings to Casa Guidi in Florence where they were placed on the mantelpiece.

 



She also, for Hengist Horne, had composed 'The Cry of the Children' which was read in the House of Lords, influencing legislation to protect children working in facotires and mines, and translated into Russian by Dosteivsky's brother Mikhail.

She, too, would come to be buried in Florence's 'English' Cemetery in a most beautiful tomb designed by Lord Leighton, having on it a broken slave shackle to signify her hatred of slavery, though she came from a Jamaican slave-owning family.


Hiram Powers, 'Greek Slave', 'America', 'Last of her Tribe'
 
Duke Alessandro and Nadezhda, Isa, Theodosia


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