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. [Footnote:
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.] My married sister
added to the number by one little anonymous high church
story, called Chollerton.
