“Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices”: Anthony Trollope and the Nineteenth-Century Global Food System

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

204 Victorians Journal “Why Frau Frohmann Raised tier Prices”: Anthony Trollope and the Nineteenth-Century Global Food System by Michelle Mouton Although Trollope’s novels may not be as liberally punctuated with food references as Dickens’s, Trollope was clearly interested in food. In 1876, when the editor of Good Words asked him to supply a “storyette,” he complied with “Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices” (Hall 419). Eight chapters in length, this comic tale about food and tourism was serialized over four issues, then republished as the title piece of Trollope’s 1882 short story collection. The protagonist is the proud and colorful Tyrolese keeper ofthe Peacock, an aptly named inn renowned for the Frau’s lavish and carefully prepared feasts. The story relates what goes wrong—the disruptions to her business, community, and personal relationships—when, rather than raise the inn’s rates to keep up with currency inflation, Frau Frohmann despotically attempts to bring down her costs by controlling the local food market’s pricing. While this story has generated little critical attention, I argue that its connections with Trollope’s travel books, themselves filled with food references, reveal the author’s concerns about and hopes for a global food system that was undergoing tremendous change in the second half of the nineteenth century.1 More specifically, I argue that “Frau Frohmann” is a fictional attempt to resolve, through symbolic means, the very real challenges that an emerging, global, industry-enabled food system posed to local food traditions. In Food and Cooking in Victorian England: A 1 Sutherland describes the story as “an allegory on the need for old people to accept change” (xxi). Stone reads this “tour de force” on “the theme of inflation” as a reminder to the older Trollope himselfofchanges in the literary marketplace (45). A sustained psychoanalytic reading appears in Shengold, who focuses on the Frau’s relationship with her daughter and sees the Frau as a representation of Anthony’s mother, Frances Trollope. The story’s focus on food is unaddressed. Victorians Journal 205 History, Andrea Broomfield reviews the dramatic shifts in English cooking practices, eating, and attitudes towards food as a result of industrialization: “stunning and far-reaching changes in food and cooking had begun to occur”; by the 1890s, new methods for preserving foods, improvements in transit systems, and the invention ofrefrigerated ships and train cars led to England’s reliance on distant food sources for basic nourishment (3, 19-20).2 If these changes ultimately resulted in improvements to the English diet, it was industrialization itself, Broomfield recounts, which led to the urban overcrowding and much of the poverty and hunger that these new technologies would eventually mitigate (17). City dwellers lacked the space to continue the long-standing tradition of keeping kitchen gardens and household livestock, while factory hours left little time for food preparation, creating heavy reliance on restaurants and other vendors ofprepared foods in urban environments (15-16). Trollope’s writings, while largely ignored by Victorian Studies scholars interested in food history, provide an important window into this transitional period.3 Not only does Trollope express appreciation for fresh foods, but he also investigates food systems throughout his travel books. When read in the context of his travel writings, “Frau Frohmann” is an ideologically conflicted and telling tale. It provides a nostalgic, fictional reassurance that a global food system trading in commodity foods could coexist alongside local food systems without significant conflict or disruption. Moreover, both Trollope’s autobiographical travel writing and “Frau Frohmann” imply that it is the English (male) tourist (or, perhaps, business traveler) who alone embodies the transnational perspective needed to understand and 2 See also Burnett on the impact of preservation and refrigeration on the British diet (117-125, 256). 3 Important recent work on Victorian literature and food include Cozzi’s The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Gwen Hyman’s Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Readings of Trollope’s travel writings tend to focus on race and empire rather than the prevalence of food references; see Aguirre, “Affairs of the State” and Buzard, “Portable Boundaries: Trollope, Race, and Travel.” Race and...