Literary notes about trollop (AI summary)
The term trollop appears across literature with a variety of nuanced uses. In early works, it is often an unflattering epithet directed at women, portraying them as disreputable or morally degenerate—as in the vivid description featuring “small twinkling ferret eyes” and disfigurement in [1], or the biting accusation in [2]. In other contexts, notably in the political and satirical narratives of The Gilded Age, Trollop is employed as a surname for characters, lending an ironic or comic edge to political discourse ([3], [4], [5]). This duality in usage—both as a pejorative remark and as a deliberate, self-aware naming—demonstrates how the term has been adapted to reflect shifting literary attitudes towards gender and authority.
- She was a little, ugly, lively trollop, with small twinkling ferret eyes, and marked with smallpox.
— from The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - 'Tis still the honest woman that must bleed for some nasty trollop or other."
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866
A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics by Various - He consulted with Trollop and one or two others.
— from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner - “Promptness is a virtue, Mr. Trollop, and I perceive that you have it.
— from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner - Mr. Trollop, you are pledged to support the Indigent Congressmen’s Retroactive Appropriation which is to come up, either in this or the next session.
— from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner