Domestic Manners of the Americans

Domestic Manners of the Americans is an 1832 travel book by
Frances Trollope which follows her travels through America and her residence in
Cincinnati, at the time still a frontier town. The book created a sensation on
both sides of the Atlantic, as 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. She was also disgusted by
slavery, of which she saw relatively little as she stayed in the South only
briefly, and by the popularity of tobacco chewing. Trollope traveled to America
together with her son Anthony Trollope, who would later become a famous author
in his own right, and with Frances Wright, a prominent abolitionist and early
feminist. She briefly stayed at the Nashoba Commune, a Utopian settlement for
ex-slaves which Wright had set up in Tennessee, where she was dismayed by the
primitive conditions.

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."

— Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.