Domestic Manners of the Americans
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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." [1]
ISBN 0-14-043561-1 First copyright 1832
