Frances Trollope, without a doubt, was the most provocative writer of the early Victorian period. Since then, unfortunately and inappropriately, she has been relegated to a paltry footnote in literary history as simply the mother of Anthony Trollope. However, many of her forty-one books impelled significant social change and greatly influenced the writers who came after her. As several scholars have argued, The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw: or Scenes on the Mississippi (1836) was a major contributing influence on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the book “that started this great war”, so President Lincoln reportedly said. In Britain shortly after …
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