SOURCE: Chaloner, W. H. “Mrs. Trollope and the Early Factory System.” Victorian Studies 4, no. 2 (December 1960): 159-66.

In the following essay, Chaloner examines the manner in which Frances Trollope researched her novel about child labor and cautions against regarding fictional representations of social problems as historically accurate.

Mrs. Frances Trollope, the mother of Anthony Trollope the novelist, is not generally associated with the North of England and its cotton industry, although her now rather rare novel, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, which appeared in twelve shilling parts during 1839-40,¹ purports to be an exposure of the worst horrors of the Industrial Revolution in the expanding textile districts. The illustrations to the book, engravings by Auguste Hervieu, R. W. Buss, and Thomas Onwhyn,² have considerable period charm, being sometimes sentimental and sometimes horrific, in the early Victorian manner.

Mrs. Trollope's first book, Domestic Manners of...