SOURCE: "Business and Bosoms: Some Trollopian Concerns," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 37, No. 3, December, 1982, pp. 293-315.

In the following essay, Collins examines Trollope's use of the financial worries of women—a prominent feature in Trollope 's fiction. Collins pays particular attention to the concern of Trollope's female characters with fortune hunting and marrying for money (rather than for love), which was considered the main way in which women could acquire wealth in the nineteenth-century.

… my Essays, which of all my other works have been most current; for that, it seems, they come home, to men's business, and bosoms.

Francis Bacon, Dedication of Essays (1625)

Like an old divine I shall divide my text, dealing first with its context, then in turn with its two substantives, then with the hyphenated concept business-and-bosoms, and finally I shall return to Bacon's sentence about why his Essays were "most current."

Blake's splendid epigrammatic comment...