INDUSTRIAL SIGHTSEEING AND FRANCES TROLLOPE'S MICHAEL ARMSTRONG, THE FACTORY BOY

Abstract

Frances Trollope's novel, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840), often gains credit from contemporary campaigners and modern critics both for alerting middle-class Victorians to conditions in the northern textile mills and contributing to the pressure on Parliament which led to further Factory Acts in the 1840s. Yet it also attracted torrents of abuse, with her descriptions slated as exaggerated, superficial and unreliable. Other women writers on this emotive topic did not attract similar venom. In order to understand why this was, this article focuses particularly on aspects of sight and vision, examining prevailing attitudes current in the late 1830s about the ways in which women could view and comment on social and political issues. Placing the discussion in an exact historical context reveals how Frances Trollope was believed to step across the line of propriety in a variety of ways: by her inclusion of illustrations and her adoption of monthly issues for the initial publication of this story; and by her words and images acknowledging the illicit sexual atmosphere imagined to be present amongst the mixed-sex workers in the factories. Her desire to tell the truth was compromised by her information coming from leading political agitators and out-of-date memoirs, as well as by her gender which typecast her as an unreliable witness. One particular illustration, “Love conquered Fear”, is analysed in this light.