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Domestic Manners of the Americans (Penguin Classics)

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This is both a great read and an important historical document. Fanny Trollope was the mother of Anthony Trollope, perhaps the most prolific English novelist of the nineteenth century and my favorite. Fanny's husband was ineffectual in the breadwinning department, but fortunately for the family, Fanny herself was energetic and enterprising. She took one of her sons (not Anthony) and an artistic young man to the United States. She was planning to join a friend of hers who was a mover in setting up the utopian community in Harmony, Indiana, but the place turned out to be squalid, and she didn't stay long.

Fanny spent most of her time in the U.S. in Cincinnati and in her book is very hard on the city and its inhabitants. She especially objected to the pigs' role as garbage collectors. (In those days, pigs roamed the streets freely, like sheep grazing.) Fanny felt most of the people she encountered were loud, dirty, vulgar, and fanatically patriotic. It is her vivid descriptions of the physical conditions and the people that give this book its historical and entertainment value.

While she was living in Cinci, she opened a retail emporium and filled it with rather shoddy merchandise sent from England by her husband. She also attempted to bring culture to the inhabitants. Not surprisingly, both ventures failed.

After Mrs. Trollope returned to England, she supported her family by writing novels that were quite popular at the time, though they haven't become the classics her son's have. She spent her final years living in Italy with another son and his wife.

Very entertaining read of the author's trip through 19th Century America, full of wonderful description and enlightening observations. Despite the griping below, Mrs Trollope simply reports what she sees - men spitting tobacco on the floor, ladies off in another room while the guys have a good time, etc. She reports accurately on our forefathers' rugged pioneer spirit, but points out the lack of education everywhere. We want to shout "lies!" but Mark Twain wrote about the same thing, and the aspects of our society that haven't changed much are still being commented on with the same frankness by writers like Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, Dawn Powell, Paul Theroux and Joan Didion. Many true-hearted Americans will enjoy this book no end. Mrs Trollope clearly loved America and simply wrote truthfully about; she is simply beholden to no one - the essence of good writing. A thoroughly refreshing read.

Frances Trollope was a well-educated and by our standards snobbish Englishwoman who visited the United States in the early part of the 19th century. Her perceptive and caustic insights into the American character remain fresh and surprisingly timeless, as well as being lucid and elegant. The book became a best-seller in England; Mrs. Trollope's son Anthony was so inspired by his mother's success that he became an author himself. Anyone interested in American history needs to read this book, which offers a point of view not often presented on this side of the Atlantic in a style that's a pleasure to read.

This is an extremely entertaining commentary on American manners and well written. I agree, however, with Mrs. Trollope's son, Anthony, who commented that Mrs. Trollope is a keen observer but she understands little. Certainly her complaints about the lack of gentility among Americans is valid but she completely missed the wonderful lack of class restraints endemic to English society which afforded Americans "class mobility"--freedom of opportunity (except for native Americans and slaves).

The book was written in the 1830's by an astute Victorian observer. It was hugely successful in England and received with horror in America, and unavailable in the U.S. for over a hundred years. This book made Fanny Trollope's career and she supported her family as a writer for the rest of her working life. The failings of American society and America's system of government are illuminated scathingly, and the amazing thing is that the observations made 150 years ago are still valid now. Topics discusse

Fanny Trollope (1779-1863) wrote over 35 novels and several non-fictions books in her effort to rescue her family from poverty. However, the most read of all her books is "Domestic Manners of the Americans" which she published in 1832. It was in that distant year that Fanny and two of her children traveled across the Atlantic Ocean. Her purpose was to join a utopian community in Tennessee whose denizens were freed slaves.
Fanny left her impecunious and feckless husband the barrister Thomas Trollope back home in England. Her famous son Anthony did not make the trip as he was a student at Harrow School. Fanny knew her husband would join her in the USA when money became available. Later the family would flee to Bruges to escape creditors. Fanny eventually lived out her life in Florence near her son Thomas Trollope.
After leaving Tennessee the Trollopes settled for two years in the Queen City of the West Cincinnati, Ohio. Fanny did not like America or the American people! She found us xenephobic; boastful, prideful and violent.She hated the hypocrisy of life in Midwest Ohio although she did attend such cultural attractions as opera, plays and lectures. She favored the state Anglican Church of Great Britain not caring for America's separation between church and state.
This book could well be read alongside Charles Dickens' "American Notes for General Circulation" based on his 1842 six month trip to the USA.
Both Trollope and Dickens found the Americans crude, lacking in manners
and eager to make a quick buck. Listen to Trollope at her most scathing:
"..among the rich and the poor, in the slave states, and in the free states...I do not like them. I do not like their principals, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions." (p.314).
Fanny Trollope's book is more interesting than Dickens since she discusses colorful characters and shares anecdotes about her sojourn in our young republic. Like Dickens she hates the odious practice of tobacco chewing and the mangling of the English language. Trollope found us Yankees to be too serious and viewing us as poorly read. Unlike the wealthy and famous Dickens, Mrs. Trollope was a middle-aged woman fighting off poverty with her pen. I enjoyed her descriptions of nature such as those she paints of the Potomac River, Northern Virginia and the Niagra Falls area in New York and Canada. She is aware of flora and fauna and describes them with knowledge and in beautiful prose.
Dickens and Trollope give us the eye to see America in the days prior to the Civil War when the curse of chattel slavery ruled the land. Since those days America has granted freedom to all citizens. I wish both Fanny and Charles could visit us again in the 21st century. Their remarks would be of great interest to this reviewer and countless others!

In 1827, at age 48, Frances Trollope arrived in New Orleans en route with some of her family to Fanny Wright's utopian community, Nashoba Commune. When that residence din't work out for her, she contunued up the Mississippi by steamboat, then up the Ohio to Cincinnati, where she stayed for roughly two years, waiting for her depressed and bankrupt husband either to join her or to find the wherewithal to support the family in England. Life in Cincinnati was utterly dreary, and Trollope was gravely ill for an extended period. Finally she fled to the east, over the Alleghenies to Baltimore and to rural Virginia where it would seem that she survived chiefly by the support of friends. She managed to visit Washington and Philadelphia, then removed to New York City. Her final adventure in America was an excursion to Niagara falls, partly via the Eerie Canal. She must have kept ample notes, which enabled her to publish "Domestic Manners of the Americans" in 1832, very soon after her return to England. The book was an immediate success and established her career as a writer. Her husband, however, never found his economic footing; he fled to Belgium with some of the children in 1834, and he died there. Fanny's eldest son, the literary giant Anthony Trollope, had not accompanied her to America, but he also would eventually write an account of his travels there. Neither mother nor son were enthusiastic about the society through which they traveled.

Unlike her son in later years, Fanny Trollope came to America not as a celebrity but as the most ordinary of economic immigrants. She had some introductions, and a few old friends from England residing here and there, but largely she was on her own, with little money, no marketable job skills, and children to care for. Thus she saw America from the bottom, from the level, you might say, of the dirt that hold the grass roots. She didn't see much that she liked, except the wild flowers, not until she reached New York anyway, and she saw even less that she respected. The America she described was a land of crude, bigoted, hard-drinking, money-grubbing louts and vulgar, silly, oppressed women. The staunchly independent western farmers lived, as she saw it, less comfortably and far less cheerfully than the least well-off of English peasants. Americans had few diversions, few pastimes, few entertainments, and seemed to have no sense that they were missing anything. They ate dismally -- bacon, onions and beef steaks thrice a day -- and worked themselves to early death, often just ahead of the fevers and agues that would have killed them soon enough anyway. They practiced the most odious sort of fanatical religion, virtually segregating their women from their men in all situations except under the quilt, yet the men showed little attention to church or morality while the women did little else beyond their household drudgery besides go to church, preferring the most hysterical forms of 'devotion'. Worse than their manners or the ugliness of their domestic arrangements, however, were their insufferable chauvinism -- their incessant boasting about their free institutions -- and their rampant hypocrisy in ranting about "equality" while sustaining slavery and brutally exploiting immigrant laborers from Ireland.

Mrs. Trollope's book, needless to say, was not well received in America. I'd venture to say that she'd have been tarred and feathered if she'd returned to Cincinnati. Her indignation at slavery was both heartfelt and fully justified. Her outrage at the brutal exploitation of the Irish was entirely proper and accurate also; in fact, just in recent years, archaeologists reported in the Smithsonian journal the discovery of a mass burial of Irish workers on the Chesapeake canal, precisely the sort of shameful occasion Trollope reported.

What I haven't yet mentioned, what probably matters most to a modern reader, is that Trollope's accounts are uproariously funny and entertainingly written. She's at her best and funniest when she's denouncing American barbarities and debunking American sanctities. Her style is relaxed and plain, surprisingly like that of her prolific son, and eminently readable. There a hundreds of delightful discoveries to be made in her descriptions: her astonishment at the multitudes of butterflies in Virginia in the summer, for instance, which brought tears to my eyes since such clouds of butterflies are gone today; her account of the liveliness of New York in comparison to other American cities even then; her bold curiosity in observing everything from revival meetings to all Black theater productions in New York. She was one unflappable "old English lady", as most Americans labeled her.

By the time she wrote this book, she was also a genuine Conservative, her conservatism having been honed by her impressions of America. She may have expected to favor that Utopian community in the backwoods, devoted to the education of African slaves, but she went home to England an avid supporter of the established church, the peerage, and the monarchy, along with the social hierarchy of British life, the stiffer discipline of British education, and the general concern of Europeans with refinement and culture. Reading Trollope's "Tory" reflections on society, one can't help recognizing that modern America utterly lacks a sort of true Conservatism, unless we are to understand that all the ill-bred barbarisms and hypocrisies of 1830 are what "we" want to conserve. From naive "exceptionalism" to the overweening regard for ill-gotten wealth to a willingness to ravage nature for short-term profit, nearly everything Trollope found odious in America has been "conserved" at least in sections of the country. The one exception, bless our hearts, is the disgusting habit of chewing tobacco and spitting voluminously, a habit that revolted dear Fanny to the soles of her shoes. I'm sure she'd be delighted, if she were brought back to life to revisit all the scenes of this book. that chewing and spitting are no longer tolerated except on baseball diamonds. Otherwise, I suspect she'd write much the same book about travels in 2012.

She wrote: "The land is defended from the river by a levee, without which the dwellings would speedily disappear. I could not help fancying nature would some day take the matter into her own hands, and if so, farewell New Orleans.

All I can say is: what a great read! Who knew? Quite frankly, upon first sight of this book I must admit a bit of dread as the puritanical artwork does not smack of fun and games. Of course, as a literature student, I should know better than to ever judge a book by its cover.
Had I been Fanny Trollope writing such an account of America in the 1820s, I would be hardpressed to say that I would have changed a single word. Trollope has been the victim of many mean spirited caricatures and accusations by Americans and it still continues today, but what is interesting is that no one can do more than attack her person. In other words, no one seems to be able to refute her claims.
Trollope's "bitchiness" seems, for the most part, merited by my standards and while she finds much to complain about concerning an American democracy in its adolescence, she certainly discovers just as many things that she likes or finds beautiful.
Plain and simple, Americans collectively have a hard time taking criticism, especially from an outsider...and at that time, political criticism from a woman was deemed absurd if not audacious.
Last but not least, Fanny Trollope is always sure to preface anything she says with the conscious realization that she can only speak for what she has seen/heard personally and is thereby not judging ALL of America.
Trollope is witty and anecdotal and I think anyone interested in what an outspoken Englishwoman had to say about the New World should certainly pick up a copy. I found particular interest in gender/religious issues but got the most laughs out of her descriptions of American manners (or the lack thereof).
It is always interesting to see how much things have changed, and better yet, how many things have remained exactly the same!

In this book which I purchased from Amazon,Frances(Fanny)Trollope recounts her visit to America beginning in 1828 with 3 of her children and spent 2 years here keenly observing and recording whatever she encountered and, particularly, conversations (almost verbatim) with people from all stations, including slaves. As I began reading this book I wanted to strangle her for some some of her opinions but as I went further I found her to be a very caring individual and one with a lot of personal courage. Frances is the mother of Anthony Trollope the prolific novelist but she too has some claim to prolificacy as she had 7 children in 9 years - no wonder she left England and husband (at least temporarily) for America!

My overall impression of 1828 America as she presents it is (as the French say): "The more things change the more they are the same." A good example of this is found on page 63 re the proposed building of a hog slaughter house close to some Ohio farm homes. The prevailing attitude then was that since money could be made why should there be any problem with building them! We have the same thing going on around our city just now where introduction of factory farms (hogs) are being bitterly contested by local farmers.