Domestic Manners Of The Americans [ By: Fanny Trollope ]

Frances Trollope has been a figure of fun and notoriety in America for over one hundred and sixty years. Ever since the publication of her Domestic Manners of the Americans in 1832, Americans have caricatured Frances Trollope as a snobbish English woman who visited briefly, misjudged a bustling frontier culture, and wrongly took the United States to task in order to make her fortune. In so doing, we have distorted Frances Trollope's image and ignored her many publications (totalling 114 volumes in all) in ways that we have not done math her even more critical but more respected male compatriots, Anthony Trollope (author of North America and her youngest son) and Charles Dickens (author of American Notes and her fellow writer).

As Mark Twain was to say in Life on the Mississippi, "poor candid Mrs. Trollope was so handsomely cursed and reviled by this nation. Yet she was merely telling the truth, and this indignant nation knew it" (391). Twain pointed out that what Mrs. Trollope attacked - "slavery, rowdyism,|chivalrous' assassinations, sham godliness, and several other devilishnesses" - richly deserved condemnation. He believed her protests to be the result of "a humane spirit [struggling] against inhumanities; of an honest nature against humbug; of a clean breeding against grossness; of a right heart against upright speech and deed" (392). For her efforts to tell the truth "fairly and squarely," Twain felt that Frances Trollope "deserved gratitude - but it is an error to suppose she got it" (391-92).