American author Mark Twain was amused and impressed by Trollope's observations of the Antebellum frontier America he grew up in: 'Mrs Trollope was so handsomely cursed and reviled by this nation telling the truth.she was painting a state of things which did not change at once.I remember it.' Benjamin Perley Poore noted the energy with which her book reviled the frontier habit of expectoration. It also enabled its author to become a wage-earner and save her family from penury. The book was both highly controversial and highly successful, selling 'like wildfire'. If the citizens of the United States were indeed the devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not thus encrust themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion, that they are the first and best of the human race, that nothing is to be learnt, but what they are able to teach, and that nothing is worth having, which they do not possess.

At the end of the book, she tried to summarise what she found wrong in the American character:Ī single word indicative of doubt, that any thing, or every thing, in that country, is not the very best in the world, produces an effect which must be seen and felt to be understood. Trollope was also harshly critical of slavery of African Americans in the United States, and by the popularity of tobacco chewing, and the consequent spitting, even on carpets.Īfter seeing much of what the United States had to offer, her overall impression was not favourable. She was appalled by America's egalitarian middle-class and by the influence of evangelicalism that was emerging during the Second Great Awakening. The book created a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, as Frances Trollope had a caustic view of the Americans and found America strongly lacking in manners and learning. According to Katherine Moore, while in America, Trollope was unhappy as a result of financial and marital difficulties. Trollope's own views on government contrasted with American-style republicanism. It had been only 15 years since the United Kingdom was at war with the United States and the earlier American Revolutionary War was still remembered.

She briefly stayed at the Nashoba Commune, a utopian settlement for ex-slaves set up by Frances Wright in Tennessee, but was dismayed by the primitive conditions. with her son Henry, 'having been partly instigated by the social and communistic ideas of a lady whom I well remember, a certain Miss Wright, who was, I think, the first of the American female lecturers' (Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography). C.200 pp (May change depending on the publisher and the size of the text)ĭomestic Manners of the Americans is a two-volume travel book by Frances Milton Trollope, published in 1832, which follows her travels through America and her residence in Cincinnati, at the time still a frontier town.įrances Trollope travelled to the U.S.

Frances trollope domestic manners