Thomas Adolphus Trollope

Thomas Adolphus Trollope wrote sixty books, lived in Italy for fifty years, and is now known as his younger brother's brother. He was the eldest surviving son of a failing barrister and of Frances Trollope, who saved the family by writing Domestic Manners of the Americans after a disastrous venture in Cincinnati that he had gone out with her to attempt. He was educated at Winchester and Oxford, taught briefly, and then settled with his mother in Florence in 1843, where they kept an English-speaking house that took in most of the literary visitors to Tuscany for a generation - the Brownings, Landor, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, Dickens. He wrote a four-volume history of the Commonwealth of Florence, works on Italian history and the papacy, travel books, and a long run of novels. He reported the Italian wars of unification for English papers and was a committed supporter of the national cause, which coloured everything he wrote about the temporal power of the popes. His first wife Theodosia Garrow was a poet and translator who worked for the same cause; their daughter Beatrice died young. He married his daughter's governess, Frances Eleanor Ternan, whose sister Ellen was Dickens's companion, so the household sat at the centre of that story too. He moved to Rome and then back to England, and published his memoirs, What I Remember, in 1887. His brother Anthony's autobiography, which describes their shared childhood misery in detail, has outsold everything he wrote. He knew Italian well enough to work from archives and was made a member of Italian learned societies. He corresponded with Dickens for thirty years and wrote for Household Words. His Florence house, the Villino Trollope in Piazza dell'Indipendenza, still stands.

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