Nashoba turned out to be a backwoods mess that would collapse the following year. Things did not exactly go according to plan. Today’s Midwest was the American Frontier. Thomas Jefferson had died only the previous year. The Louisiana Purchase, doubling the nation’s size, was barely two dozen years old. His parents hoped he might find his way in the New World.Īfter a two-month voyage from London to New Orleans, the Trollope party arrived in a very adolescent United States. Her husband, however, was an increasingly unsuccessful barrister, and their eldest son, Henry, was faring poorly at school. Trollope was forty-seven, a clergyman’s daughter who grew to be very well connected in British and French cultural and intellectual circles while bearing seven children. She intended also to visit friends in New York, and she carried letters of introduction from the Marquis de Lafayette, a revolutionary and national hero in France and America, whom she had met through Wright. She planned to visit Nashoba, a utopian colony in present-day Tennessee founded by her friend, social reformer Fanny Wright, that was intended to educate and emancipate enslaved people.

In 1827, Frances “Fanny” Trollope traveled from England to America with three of her children in the hope of reviving her family’s fortunes, leaving behind for a while her husband and other children, including their son Anthony. :: RETROSCOPE :: Retroscope is a regular series that mines the past for literary travel writing gems.īright tints, bulrushes, two-horned churches, luxuriating crocodiles, mephitic air, vegetable walls, thriftless husbandry & the father of waters.

The marquis inferno torrent