Domestic Manners of the Americans

Frances (Fanny) Trollope, today best known as the mother of the popular Victorian author Anthony Trollope, was herself an extraordinarily productive writer in many genres. Her literary career began in middle age when, out of financial desperation, she wrote a travelog describing her impressions of America, gathered on a three-year excursion there. Published in 1832 in two volumes, Domestic Manners of the Americans was a runaway bestseller and a wildly controversial takedown of what Trollope saw as a backward, uncouth, and hypocritical new nation.

Trollope sailed for America in 1827 with three of her children; also accompanying her was the young French illustrator Auguste Hervieu and the social reformer Fanny Wright. Their intended destination was the Nashoba Commune, a utopian settlement for formerly enslaved people set up in Tennessee by Trollope’s friend Wright.

Inspired by Wright’s idealism, the staunchly abolitionist Trollope was looking forward to seeing the stereotypical America: a land of opportunity where liberal-minded people lived in a veritable paradise. Once there, however, both Trollope and Hervieu were deeply disappointed by the Commune’s primitive conditions and left after a short stay.

After travelling north up the Mississippi River, they landed in Cincinnati, Ohio, a city that was believed in England to be the perfect place to settle. On a random whim, Trollope’s husband raised enough funds to build an upscale emporium, which was basically a department store along with a ballroom, lecture hall, and other attractions. It was immediately declared a horrible eyesore and nicknamed “Trollope’s Folly.”

Yet another failure that ended in bankruptcy, it prompted Fanny Trollope to gather the notes she had been keeping about her American adventure and put them together into a book. Hervieu, meanwhile, contributed the satirical drawings he made while traveling to illustrate Trollope’s book.

Domestic Manners of the Americans created a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, causing Trollope to be nicknamed “Old Madam Vinegar” for her caustic opinions. Published at a time when the British legislature was debating whether to enact legislation that would model Britain along more democratic lines, Trollope’s book was widely interpreted as an attempt to stop these reforms from taking place.

While a number of critics questioned Trollope’s objectivity in her observations on the American scene, most agreed that she exhibited a witty and entertaining writing style. Not least, proceeds from the book allowed Trollope and her family to avoid financial ruin.

This guide refers to the 1997 Penguin Classics edition of the Domestic Manners.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss enslavement.

Summary

As Part 1 begins, Fanny Trollope departs by ship from London in November 1827 accompanied by her son, two daughters, and two adult friends (Auguste Hervieu and Fanny Wright), arriving at the mouth of the Mississippi River on Christmas Day. They spend time in New Orleans and eventually make their way to Nashoba, Tennessee, with plans to live at the newly established commune there. Horrified by the living conditions at the commune, Trollope decides to leave and settle instead in Cincinnati to wait for her husband. From Cincinnati, Trollope continues on to Washington, DC, with her stay there concluding Part 1.

In Part 2, Trollope makes a side trip from Washington to a friend’s estate in Maryland, and she also sees quite a bit of the Virginia side of the Potomac River. She then travels to Philadelphia, New York City, and upstate in New York state, eventually landing in Niagara Falls and going as far as the Canadian border. She returns to New York City to say goodbye to her friends there, then boards the ship back home to England as the book concludes.

Overall, while making notable exceptions, Trollope is disgusted by the vulgar manners of the people she meets, dismayed at their cultural backwardness, skeptical of the motives of evangelical preachers emerging during the Second Great Awakening movement, and horrified at the hypocritical politics of a country that worshipped liberty while enslaving people. This summary will take each topic in turn.

Trollope finds American manners abhorrent. She criticizes everything from the way people use their knives to shovel food into their mouths to the way they use pocketknives as toothpicks. Most disgusting of all is the common habit of chewing tobacco, particularly since it usually ends in people spitting their wads of tobacco out in public—even onto a floor inside a building or onto carpets inside their own houses.

Trollope finds Americans almost willfully uncultured. She is surprised at how poorly educated they are and how much they resist learning anything new. Visiting a community of self-subsistence farmers in the woods, she finds strange the absence of civic life or cultural touchstones: “No village bell ever summoned them to prayer […] When they die, no spot sacred by ancient reverence will receive their bones” (43).

Trollope observes several religious tent meetings, wryly noting that these seem to be held either as faddish shows for entertainment-starved Americans or for the sexual gratification of the preachers: “Many of these wretched creatures were beautiful young females. The preachers moved about among them, at once exciting and soothing their agonies” (131). There are few if any redeeming qualities by her description.

Trollope’s main source of indignation comes from the hypocrisy of slavery. A committed abolitionist who had written an anti-slavery novel, Trollope already hated Thomas Jefferson. She considers him “a heartless libertine and an unprincipled tyrant who fathered children by almost all of his female slaves” (58) while at the same time writing about equality and liberty. Other enslavers are similarly castigated: “You will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves” (168).

The unjust and inhumane treatment of Indigenous Americans also gives rise to Trollope’s ire: Visiting the Bureau for Indian Affairs in Washington, she reprimands the US government for its “treacherous policy” of routing Indigenous peoples from their ancestral land.

Somewhat paradoxically, considering her views of slavery and Indigenous Americans, it is clear that Trollope comes back from America with a slightly more conservative view of total egalitarianism. Before her trip, she was a supporter of breaking down class barriers, but in practice, she finds it deeply unpleasant to be treated as the equal of those she considered her social inferiors. She comes back with the opinion that there is nothing wrong with upholding the distinctions between social classes after all.

In a much-quoted saying, Trollope summarizes that what is really wrong with Americans is their obstinate belief that their way is the only good way. Toward the end of the book, she writes:

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 learned, but what they are able to teach, and that nothing is worth having, which they do not possess (317).