 First edition title page | |
| Author | Frances Milton Trollope |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
Publication date | 1832 [1] |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) & E-book |
| Pages | c.200 pp (May change depending on the publisher and the size of the text) |
Domestic 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.
Frances Trollope travelled to the U.S. 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). 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.
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. Trollope's own views on government contrasted with American-style republicanism. According to Katherine Moore, while in America, Trollope was unhappy as a result of financial and marital difficulties.
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. She was appalled by America's egalitarian middle-class and by the influence of evangelicalism that was emerging during the Second Great Awakening. 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.
After seeing much of what the United States had to offer, her overall impression was not favourable. At the end of the book, she tried to summarise what she found wrong in the American character:
A 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. 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.
The book was both highly controversial and highly successful, selling "like wildfire". It also enabled its author to become a wage-earner and save her family from penury. [2] 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 [for] telling the truth...she was painting a state of things which did not change at once...I remember it." [3] Benjamin Perley Poore noted the energy with which her book reviled the frontier habit of expectoration. "So often did Mrs. Trollope recur to this habit," Poore wrote, "that she managed to give one the impression that this country was in those days a sort of huge spittoon." [4]
The Quarterly Review praised Trollope's humour and descriptive skill:
... Nothing is so easy as speculating in our closets on the probable effects of any given arrangement of public affairs; and if the results of such imaginary politics were confined to the Utopias in which their ingenious authors gave them birth, we should have no objection to their theories. But when they are boldly obtruded upon the notice of the country as formulæ for actual practice, we feel it our duty, not to take these speculative conclusions for granted, but to turn the ' telescope of truth' to the existing facts themselves, and through the medium of an intelligent traveller's optics, ' bring life near in utter nakedness.' In this spirit we have read Mrs. Trollope's book with interest and instruction—we may add, with great amusement; for it is written with much humour, and is eminently graphic throughout,—touching with singular skill, a vast variety of topics, which, perhaps, only a female eye could correctly appreciate, or a female pen do justice to in description. [5]
According to Katherine Moore (writing in 1985), Trollope "had no profundity of thought...but she had a seeing eye and a lively pen". Her descriptions are "never boring: she makes us see the lonely clearings and farms, the huge silent rivers, Niagara, untamed and unvulgarised, the clear bright air ..." [2]
In a 1836 letter to the Ministry of War, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna quoted Trollope as an anti-slavery intellectual whose example must be followed. [6]
Frances Wright, widely known as Fanny Wright, was a Scottish-born lecturer, writer, freethinker, feminist, utopian socialist, abolitionist, social reformer, and Epicurean philosopher, who became a US citizen in 1825. The same year, she founded the Nashoba Commune in Tennessee as a utopian community to demonstrate how to prepare slaves for eventual emancipation, but the project lasted only five years.
Anna Brownell Jameson was an Anglo-Irish art historian whose work spanned art and literary criticism, philosophy, travel writing, and feminism. She became very well known for her extensive writings. Jameson was connected to some of the most prominent names of the period including Joanna Baillie, Fanny Kemble, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning and Robert Browning, Harriet Martineau, Ottilie von Goethe, Lady Byron, Harriet Hosmer, Ada Lovelace, Charles and Elizabeth Eastlake, and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon.
Lydia Maria Child was an American abolitionist, women's rights activist, Native American rights activist, novelist, journalist, and opponent of American expansionism. Her journals, both fiction and domestic manuals, reached wide audiences from the 1820s through the 1850s. At times she shocked her audience as she tried to take on issues of both male dominance and white supremacy in some of her stories.
Thomas Corwin, also known as Tom Corwin, The Wagon Boy, and Black Tom was a politician from the state of Ohio. He represented Ohio in both houses of Congress and served as the 15th governor of Ohio and the 20th Secretary of the Treasury. After affiliating with the Whig Party, he joined the Republican Party in the 1850s. Corwin is best known for his sponsorship of the proposed Corwin Amendment, which was presented in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid the oncoming American Civil War.
Frances Milton Trollope, also known as Fanny Trollope, was an English novelist who wrote as Mrs. Trollope or Mrs. Frances Trollope. Her book, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), observations from a trip to the United States, is the best known.
The Nashoba Community was an experimental project of Frances "Fanny" Wright, initiated in 1825 to educate and emancipate slaves. It was located in a 2,000-acre (8 km2) woodland on the side of present-day Germantown, Tennessee, a Memphis suburb, along the Wolf River. It was a small-scale test of her full-compensation emancipation plan in which no slaveholders would lose money for emancipating slaves. Instead, Wright proposed that, through a system of unified labor, the slaves would buy their freedom and then be transported to Haiti or the settlements which would become Liberia.
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Maria W. Stewart was an American teacher, journalist, abolitionist and lecturer known for her role in the anti-slavery and women's rights movements in the United States. The first known American woman to speak to a mixed audience of men and women, white and black, she was also the first African American woman to make public lectures, as well as to lecture about women's rights and make a public speech opposing slavery.
John Milton Bernhisel was an American physician, politician, and early member of the Latter Day Saint movement. He was a close friend and companion to both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Bernhisel was the original delegate of the Utah Territory in the United States House of Representatives and acted as a member of the Council of Fifty of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Thomas Adolphus Trollope was an English writer who was the author of more than 60 books. He lived most of his life in Italy creating a renowned villa in Florence with his first wife, Theodosia, and later another centre of British society in Rome with his second wife, the novelist Frances Eleanor Trollope. His mother, brother and both wives were known as writers. He was awarded the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus by Victor Emmanuel II of Italy.
Perley Poore Sheehan was an American film writer, novelist and film director. He was once married to Virginia Point (1902-unknown). Sheehan also wrote detective and adventure fiction for the pulp magazines. Sheehan wrote two fantasy novels, The Abyss of Wonders (1915), about a lost civilization in the Gobi Desert, and The Red Road to Shamballah (1932–1933) about a hero with a Tibetan magic sword.
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Moving Day was a tradition in New York City dating back to colonial times and lasting until after World War II. On February 1, sometimes known as "Rent Day", landlords would give notice to their tenants what the new rent would be after the end of the quarter, and the tenants would spend good-weather days in the early spring searching for new houses and the best deals. On May 1, all leases in the city expired simultaneously at 9:00 am, causing thousands of people to change their residences, all at the same time.
This is a bibliography of the works of Frances Trollope.
The Boston Atlas (1832–1857) newspaper of Boston, Massachusetts, was published in daily and semi-weekly editions in the mid-19th century. John H. Eastburn established the paper in 1832. Editors included Richard Hildreth, Richard Haughton, William Hayden, Thomas M. Brewer, William Schouler, R. Carter. Among the contributors: Joseph Carter Abbott, Benjamin Perley Poore, Samuel F. Tappan. Its office stood at no.18 State Street and later in the Old State House. The paper supported the Whig Party. Its Democratic rival, with which it sparred constantly, was The Boston Post. In 1857 the Boston Traveller absorbed The Atlas.
Frances Eleanor Trollope was an English novelist. She was best known for her biography on her mother-in-law, Frances Milton Trollope, who was famous for her book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, as well as her novels.
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The Vicar of Wrexhill is an 1837 novel by the British writer Frances Milton Trollope, originally published in three volumes. The High Church Anglican Trollope was heavily critical of the Evangelical movement. It has been described as a "scurrilous" critique of Low church Evangelical Anglicanism, often referred to in the novel as Calvinist Doctrine. It is Frances Milton Trollope's best remembered novel, with the protagonist resembling Mr Slope in her son Anthony Trollop's Barchester Towers.
Domestic Manners of the Americans public domain audiobook at LibriVox