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Philip Spiess
MRS. TROLLOPE IN CINCINNATI I: The Bizarre Bazaar
Mrs. Trollope Comes to Cincinnati: “It seems hardly fair to quarrel with a place because its staple commodity is not pretty, but I am sure I should have liked Cincinnati much better if the people had not dealt so very largely in hogs.” These delicate feelings were expressed by Mrs. Frances Trollope as she considered her three-year sojourn in Cincinnati. Mother of the noted English novelist Anthony Trollope [he of the “Barsetshire Chronicles” – though I frankly prefer his novel The Way We Live Now (1874-1875), as being far more robust], Frances Trollope was a noted writer in her own day, as well as an inspiring conversationalist, giver of brilliant soirees, and untiring manager of her large and rather unstable family.
The family thus mentioned comprised, in addition to Madame, Thomas Anthony Trollope (neurotic and ulcer-ridden failure of a husband); Thomas Adolphus Trollope (eldest son and eventually a writer in his own right); Henry Trollope (a witty but sickly youth who died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-three); Cecilia Trollope (a charming but not overly intellectual girl); Anthony Trollope (the gawking youth who never quite forgave his mother for having deserted him during her travels in America); and Emily Trollope (who possessed all of her mother’s wit and charm, and most of her mother’s affection, but who also died from tuberculosis in her teens). All of these odd members of an unusual family eventually found their way to Cincinnati during the years 1828-1831, when Mrs. Trollope was in residence – except for Anthony, who only visited Cincinnati many years later.
“Can a forty-eight-year-old English housewife from Harrow-on-the-Hill with three sick children and an impoverished French artist in tow find lasting happiness in a small Midwestern American town of 20,000 inhabitants, most of them pork-packers and all of them accomplished spitters?” [see “Forum” Post #4519, “The Burnet House Hotel”]. This might have been the question Fanny Trollope asked herself as she stepped up the paved wharf at Cincinnati on February 10, 1828. She was already weary from uncomfortable travel, unaccommodating Americans, and unaccountable finances, and so in Cincinnati she hoped to address these persistent problems and at last find some peace.
Concerning Family Issues: Frances Milton Trollope had married an aspiring lawyer who had been a renowned classical scholar and who was heir to a large fortune, and thus she had had the highest hopes for settling down in London to become a beloved and admired hostess, catering to brilliant circles of British notables and having the world at her feet. However, quite early in his law career it became evident that Thomas Anthony Trollope would never attain greatness, much less a suitable practice, for he had developed a persecution mania that caused him to create enemies and lose friends. As a result, financial worries began to attach themselves to the family, which thereby moved to a farm outside of London in hopes of acquiring more invigorating surroundings. For ten years the family managed to survive, but at last the farm failed, and Fanny Trollope sought new worlds to conquer in order to save the family from a dire plight.
The new world to conquer came in the guise of the New World itself. Fanny fell under the spell of Miss Frances Wright, a devotee of the social reformer Robert Owen and a siren who could hypnotize with words (and who wore Turkish trousers to boot). Miss Wright had devised a scheme to emancipate Negro slaves in the Mississippi River valley by founding, with her vast fortune, a free and ideal community, replete with teachers and with all working together for the common good (in other words, a proto-Socialist utopia). Fanny Trollope thought she saw in this scheme the answer to her family’s woes, and so, in the autumn of 1827, she joined the expedition to the New World with her children Henry, Cecilia, and Emily, and set out for what she believed to be the Promised Land.
A Brief Nod at Nashoba: Nashoba, as Frances Wright’s settlement in Mississippi was called, turned out to be a dismal failure, at least as far as the Trollope family was concerned. After seven weeks of seasickness, the party arrived in Mississippi and, after escaping numerous dangers in its deep and primitive forests, finally arrived at Nashoba, which turned out to be a vast sea of mud on which a few miserable log huts were afloat. One night in the place was too much for Fanny Trollope, and she decided to head north to try her luck in the up-and-coming town of Cincinnati.
First Impressions: Perhaps unhappy with her experiences so far in America and disgusted by the habits of her fellow steamboat passengers, Mrs. Trollope began to criticize Cincinnati even before she got off the boat. “It is,” she said, “by no means a city of striking appearance; it wants domes, towers, and steeples. . . .“ [Note: The city was only just forty years old, having been carved out of the wilderness by New Jersey pioneers.] She was to add her own domes and towers, if not steeples, before departing three years later, thereby disfiguring the Cincinnati skyline for some fifty years [as you can just see in the famous 1848 daguerreotype of the Cincinnati waterfront, a blow-up of which hangs in the main reading room of the Cincinnati Public Library] and providing a tourist attraction notable for its hideousness.
Mrs. Trollope, her children, and Auguste Hervieu, the French artist and political exile who was to have been the learned professor of art at Nashoba, but who had cast his lot with the Trollopes, first stayed in what Mrs. Trollope called the “Washington Hotel” (it was actually the Cincinnati Hotel); there she ordered tea to be delivered to their rooms. At once the proprietor, a descendant of Cromwell, arrived on the scene and informed her that tea was not to be served in private. Fanny pleaded ignorance of American manners, to which the proprietor replied, “Our manners are very good manners, and we don’t wish any changes from England.” It was, no doubt, at this point that Mrs. Trollope began to have the first glimmerings of an idea – or at least of a title – for what became her famous book on America and the Americans [see below].
Plans and Rejections: Mrs. Trollope’s stay in Cincinnati was planned with one thing in mind: she hoped to make some sort of successful business venture in Cincinnati to build up her resources, and then to send for her husband and oldest son to come join the rest of the family in America (son Anthony, apparently, was to be left behind). For a while she subsisted on her own amounts of money and those provided by the artist Hervieu. She had also hoped to establish her soirees and thereby become the social center of an intellectual elite [!]. This she naturally expected to accomplish, as she represented (at least to herself) the successful product of a European upbringing and talent, one thrust suddenly into the midst of a barely nascent Midwestern demi-culture, to which she felt superior. Because of this attitude, she was bound to fail on both accounts.
For things had not been going well for Fanny Trollope along the social lines she had planned out for herself. With the coming of summer, the Trollopes had moved a mile and a half outside the city to the village of Mohawk, located at the foot of the northern hills that surround the downtown basin, where work was being done on the construction of the Miami & Erie Canal [see “Forum” Post #4476 on the building of the canal and the later Rapid Transit System], because this Englishwoman could not put up with the live hogs roaming the city streets on their way to the slaughterhouse and serving as the unofficial street-cleaners by eating all the refuse and offal on the way. Time and time again Fanny had tried to establish her “enlightened circle” and to place culture (admittedly European culture) before the general populace of Cincinnati. To this end, her family put on numerous plays, including Shakespeare; one performance featured son Henry as Falstaff, and, as he showed up drunk, the play was even funnier than usual.
But it was to no avail. One Cincinnatian told Fanny that “Chaucer and Spenser were obsolete, Byron and Pope scandalous, Dryden outdated, and Shakespeare downright obscene!” The reasons for Mrs. Trollope’s social ostracism by Cincinnatians are not hard to find. In her excursions into town she would upbraid the local citizens for their lack of suitable dignity and failure to maintain “the proprieties,” all the while she herself was traveling without a husband, embarking on questionable commercial adventures (with the big one to come!), and living in a sort of communal “family” with a “French artist”! And, on top of all that, these proud local citizens, bursting with American patriotic fervor, did not take kindly to an imperious unknown Englishwoman lecturing them on their failings and telling them what to do. But worse was to follow.
“The Great Project”: Mrs. Trollope’s new project was, she thought, guaranteed to bring European culture and fine manners to Cincinnati, at the same time ensuring the Trollope family a neat little income. It would also, no doubt, provide the desired opening into Cincinnati high society (such as it was). And so Fanny embarked on her “Great Project.” This was to be the creation of an institution combining the special features of an Athenaeum, a lecture hall, a high-class café, and a “bazaar” (i.e., a high-toned merchandise mart, offering somewhat exotic goods – what today we would call a “department store”). It would contain art galleries, a theater for dramatic performances and public readings and lectures (to be given by noted professors from the Eastern Seaboard), musicales, balls, and receptions. (Needless to say, Cincinnati had nothing like this in 1828, except, perhaps, the balls occasionally given in the few mansions in town, which Fanny Trollope considered dreary affairs.) All this culture was to be supported through the proceeds from the bazaar, which was to exhibit for sale fashionable garments and accessories imported straight from Europe! To add tone to this commercial venture, young and stylish upper class society maidens would serve as clerks at the sales counters. And to preside over this whole assemblage there was going to be witty Mrs. Trollope herself!
In the autumn Mr. Trollope arrived in Cincinnati with his eldest son, Thomas Adolphus. He approved of the plan for the “Great Project,” as usual trusting everything to his ambitious wife. Together they visited a transplanted Englishman, William Bullock, well known in London, who lived across the Ohio River in Kentucky at “Elmwood Hall.” Mr. Bullock had retired from his work as a showman and exhibitor of curiosities, having been designer and proprietor of London’s “Egyptian Hall,” a neo-Egyptian pile that had served as his museum and theater, and so one suspects quite strongly that Mrs. Trollope received the ideas for her bazaar [and another project – see Part II] from Mr. Bullock.
In the spring of 1829 Mr. Trollope and son sailed back to England, Mrs. Trollope having given her husband detailed accounts of goods to be shipped back to Cincinnati to open “the Bazaar” (as it was being called). Work had begun on the actual building, which was to stand on Third Street, a little east of Broadway and practically on the site of old Fort Washington. The design, judging from illustrations in the journals of the day, was Moorish Oriental in style, leaning toward the Gothic. The front façade, approached by three staircases, consisted primarily of three two-and-a-half-story windows, the top fourth of each window being Arabesque in style. A ballroom, decorated in “the Egyptian style,” occupied the second story behind the Arabesque windows, and at the rear of the main hall was a Rotunda, intended as the exhibition space for M. Hervieu’s painting of the “Landing of Lafayette” (whether at Philadelphia in July, 1777, to fight in the Revolutionary War, or at Cincinnati in May, 1825, on his farewell visit to America, is not explained).
But construction of the “Bazaar” was going slowly. Then suddenly the building was completed, and The Cincinnati Directory of 1829 described it as follows (excerpted here, as the description is long and flowery, and one can hardly doubt that it was written by Mrs. Trollope herself, as it comprises all of the plans for the Bazaar, many of which were never carried out, as well as chic literary phrases and artistic descriptions):
“THE BAZAAR. – This exotic title carries the imagination directly to Constantinople, so celebrated for Mosques, Minarets, Caravanseras [sic] and Bazaars. . . . The basement story, which is entered by three several flights of stone steps, contains divers neat and commodious apartments. Those fronting the street are designed for an Exchange Coffee House, one of them to be fitted up and furnished as a Bar Room, the other to be appropriated . . . to the transaction of general Commercial Business. Over the basement is a splendid compartment, 60 feet by 28, and ornamented by two rows of Columns passing through it. . . . Here is to be held The Bazaar, where, it is presumeable [sic], every useful and useless article in dress, in stationary [sic], in light and ornamental household furniture, chinas and more pellucid porcelains, with every gewgaw that can contribute to the splendor and attractiveness of the exhibition, from the sparkling necklace of ‘Lady fair’ to the Exquisite’s safety-chain, will be displayed and vended.
“In the rear of the Bazaar is an elegant Saloon, where Ices and other refreshments will lend their allurements to the fascinations of architectural novelty. This Saloon opens to a spacious Balcony, which in its turn conducts to an Exhibition Gallery, that is at present occupied by Mr. Hervieu’s superb picture of Lafayette’s landing. . . . Above the Bazaar is a magnificent Ball Room. . . . The walls and the arched and lofty ceiling of this delectable apartment are to be decorated by the powerful pencil of Mr. Hervieu. The rear of the room is occupied by an orchestral gallery. . . .
“Behind the Ball Room is another superb Saloon, issuing also to a Balcony. This division is assigned to the accommodation of gentlemen’s private parties, where the beau monde may regale themselves when and how they list. Over this is a circular structure of exceedingly light and beautiful proportions, which is intended for Panoramic Exhibitions [these were the curved or fully circular giant paintings of the period; see the panorama painting of the Cincinnati Wharf in the Cincinnati History Museum at Union Terminal; or the cycloramas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), at Gettysburg, Pa., or at Atlanta, Ga.]; and around it is constructed, in concentric circles, an airy Corridor, from whence the eye, . . . may recreate itself amid the varied beauties and blandishments of nature [this describes the ugly squat crenellated roof turret that can be seen in the daguerreotype of 1848, a harbinger of the design of the ironclad Navy vessel, the U. S. S. Monitor].
“The rear of this unique and multifidous [?] edifice presents a noble Façade of Egyptian Columns, which will vie, in magnificence and novelty, with the Arabian windows that decorate its front. The apartments are all to be lighted by Gas, furnished by Mr. Delany [this turned out to be a fiction (see below), as interior gas lighting, introduced in Baltimore in 1817 at Peale’s Museum, did not reach Cincinnati until 1837]. The whole arrangement and architectural device of this superb building reflects great credit upon the taste and skill of Mr. Palmer, the architect.” All in all, if you read closely between the lines in the full Directory description, you will find that the building was hardly finished at the time of writing.
Aftermath: This whole Byzantine extravaganza was a dismal failure, financial and otherwise. Lecturers invited to speak at the Bazaar refused to come. Young folks in Cincinnati invited to join the sales and management staffs as assistants to help run the Bazaar refused to accept positions. And at this point, Fanny Trollope came down with malaria; her son Henry (who was sick every other week of his life) came down with it also. The attending doctor informed Fanny that if Henry stayed in Cincinnati, he would not live another year. Therefore, she determined to sell the Bazaar, hoping to get what price she could.
Bur new distress awaited Fanny. As she began making plans to leave Cincinnati, the bazaar goods that she had had her husband send from England arrived. What her pathetic husband had been up to in England she did not know, but all of the miscellaneous wares he sent were of the shoddiest manufacture and design. Not a single item was calculated to excite the imagination or admiration of the prospective Cincinnati buyers. (Perhaps in his brief visit to the town he had taken them as country bumpkins.) In addition, the Bazaar was not situated close to what was then the mainstream of business life in the city; the workmen were discovered to have been charging Fanny three times the market price on bricks; and the gas pipes (for that gas lighting), it was learned, were conducting nothing but a steady flow of hot air! In short, the Americans had taken the Englishwoman who had mocked them for what is known as “a summer sleigh ride.” Oh, and to conclude the matter, Mrs. Trollope was now trapped in Cincinnati for the winter by ice floes in the Ohio River.
Revenge: “I cannot speculate and I cannot reason,” said Mrs. Trollope, “but I can see and hear.” She spent all that winter recording her reminiscences of scenes and conversations of her several years in the city and began to write her scathing criticism of America and Americans – and particularly Cincinnati – namely, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). It was in this two-volume work that she saw her future glory, her financial salvation, and her ultimate revenge.
After leaving Cincinnati, the Trollopes, still accompanied by the artist Auguste Hervieu, who was doing the illustrations for Domestic Manners, quickly traveled over other parts of America in order to round out the scope of the book. In speaking of Americans, Fanny wrote: “I do not like them. I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions. . . .” When her book was published shortly after her return to England, it was an instantaneous success with her English audience; it made her famous overnight. The Americans, however, more likely said, “I do not like her opinions!” But Mark Twain, years later, discussing English critics of 19th century America in some of the suppressed passages in his Life on the Mississippi, said, “I like Dame Trollope best. . . . She found a civilization here which you, reader, could not have endured. . . . Mrs. Trollope . . . dealt what the gamblers call a strictly ‘square game.’ She did not gild us; and neither did she whitewash us.”
Finale: So what happened to the building known as “Trollope’s Bazaar”? The building had been sold to pay the workmen’s liens. It was purchased in 1839 by the Ohio Mechanics’ Institute [see “Forum” Post #5363; in the latter half of the 20th century, the Institute became the Ohio College of Applied Sciences, then merged with the University of Cincinnati] for $10,000, which used its halls for lectures, its saloons for a library, its coffee house for the Academy of Natural Sciences, and its ballroom for living quarters for the family of the Institute’s president. But the Institute failed to pay the balance of purchase money and left the building.
When Anthony Trollope, the novelist and son of Mrs. Trollope, finally visited Cincinnati in 1861-1862, he stopped by “Trollope’s Folly” and found it “had become a Physico-medical institute . . . , under the dominion of a quack doctor on one side and of a college of rights-of-women female medical professors on the other. ‘I believe, sir, no man or woman ever made a dollar in that building; and as for rent, I don’t even expect it.’” So said the then proprietor to Anthony Trollope, but he was wrong. It subsequently fell into the hands of some “Queen City” fancy women, who turned it into a house of ill repute. The structure was torn down in March, 1881, as unwept in its disappearance from the Cincinnati scene as was the lady who created it.
As for that lady herself, Frances Trollope lived out her declining years in Paris, writing successful books about other countries, though none was as successful as Domestic Manners. She loved Paris, although she did not seem to mind its filth-ridden streets and miasmic sewers as she had minded similar ones in Cincinnati. But then she evidently preferred “frogs” to hogs.
In her book, Cincinnati: Story of the Queen City, the Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun, daughter of the prominent Longworth family and long-time resident of both Cincinnati and Paris herself, wrote: “When I asked old Cincinnati ladies why Frances Trollope wrote of her sojourn with so much bitterness, the answer was invariably: ‘My dear, she never could get in. Her manners were bad and she had no refinement. After seeing how she behaved in market no one could think of asking her inside a drawing room.’ What constitutes refinement is a matter more or less of opinion.”
[Coming soon: “Mrs. Trollope in Cincinnati II: ‘The Infernal Regions’”]
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