The Italian scenes in Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right

Abstract

Anthony Trollope is so pre-eminently the novelist of Victorian England that it is easy to overlook the importance of Italy to the Trollope family and Trollope's intimate knowledge of Italy and Italian society. In 1846 his mother, the irrepressible Fanny Trollope, had persuaded her eldest son Thomas and his wife to settle in Florence and in 1850 she and Thomas's family had bought the Villino Trollope on the Piazza dell'Indipendenza with its formal garden and orange and lemon orchard. Thomas had already been living for some time in Italy and writing on Italian history and soon Anthony and his wife Rose were to join them. Fanny Trollope, Anthony's mother, had visited Italy first in 1841 and with her usual industry had published an account of her voyage. Anthony himself paid several visits to his brother's house in Florence and met there the English and American guests who included Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and her husband George Lewes, and the American novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, authoress of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Few of Trollope's novels stray from his familiar territory of the British and Irish society of his day, but this exception is one of his finest novels, He Knew He was Right.