Friction against all sorts of odd people in the business of making a livelihood out of her pen had not left Frances Trollope without the pride of order and lineage becoming a daughter of the ancient Gresley stock. That spirit she wished to remain in the family. Not, therefore, without some misgivings did she see the mixed society of the time open its doors to her sons. She was equally ready to satirise the polite systems of Paris and Vienna. She enjoyed, however, both capitals in their way. As for the French metropolis, it ought of course to be under a legitimist sovereign. Failing, however, a Bourbon of the older branch, she could manage to do with the bourgeois Court of Louis Philippe. With respect to her boys, they had, she thanked Providence, enough of the Trollope and Milton pride to keep them proof against contracting any democratic taint of ideas or of demeanour. She had at first intended that they should ripen into Parliament men. Fate had decided against that. She had herself, by holding up to both of them the dark side of the picture, done what she could to cool the literary enthusiasm both of Tom and Tony. The rest she must leave to Heaven. The literary gift, indeed, was much to be thankful for. She had beheld its growth with pride, and done what she could to train it in her children, but only as the intellectual ornament, adding a suitable grace and finish to those whom Providence had above all things intended should be gentlefolk. It was something to be, as Mrs. Trollope had undoubtedly made herself, the most talked of and the most widely read among novelists. If that achievement were not enough on which to rest, Mrs. Trollope, it must be remembered, was a very sensitive and impressionable, as well as clever and energetic woman. From her infancy she had lived among those who always spoke as if the socially levelling movement, inseparable from the Whig and Radical propagandism of the time, must have results ruinous, not only to Church and Throne, but to the privileged classes, whose welfare was as essential to the country as that of the Crown and Altar itself.
To Mrs. Trollope there had seemed something of an indignity in her son being bound over to Government service under an arbitrary taskmaster at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Whoever his chief there may have been, Colonel Maberly or Rowland Hill, the fetters that bound him did not prove very galling. No short-handedness in the department, no vindictive coercion by the head of his room ever prevented young Anthony Trollope from promptly obeying his mother’s invitation when she saw some opportunity socially favourable for her boy. In town or country she rose every morning at half-past four, and, sitting down to work at once, got nearly her day’s task accomplished before breakfast. When she visited her daughter and son-in-law in Cumberland, she made a kind of triumphal progress through the county, crowning her round of visits with a little stay at Lowther Castle, the headquarters of north country Toryism. Her host, Lord Lonsdale, knew she had at least one son a Government clerk; she must have him up there for a little change, to show him the place. And so, throughout Anthony Trollope’s youthful turn at the Post Office, it continued. Money troubles, of course, he had. A young man without private means, however much in luck’s way, could not have rubbed shoulders with the best people in England and France without being sorely put to it at times for ready cash. Naturally he got into debt, and had small transactions with the petty usurers, then as now ready to accommodate youthful civilians on the security of their weekly wage. His recourse to the professional money-lender had the advantage of preserving to him many private friendships which might otherwise have been forfeited. Even as regards his mother, if there were advances to him from that quarter, they generally came at her initiative rather than at his own request. She usually contrived to have enough for her own industry and health. Even when her ventures were most prosperous, she denied herself much that she would have liked. Her son therefore, in all his juvenile straits, seldom, if indeed ever, drew upon her. Others with whom he was more or less closely connected, Meetkerkes or Miltons, were suffered to know nothing whatever about his difficulties.