Domestic Manners of the Americans

Buy for your Kindle. 99 cents, and you can make the font larger when you read it. This book's font is like an eight in size, if that. You need those magnifying glasses to try to read it. Irritating that a company would print something like this.

This is both a great read and an important historical document. Fanny Trollope was the mother of Anthony Trollope, perhaps the most prolific English novelist of the nineteenth century and my favorite. Fanny's husband was ineffectual in the breadwinning department, but fortunately for the family, Fanny herself was energetic and enterprising. She took one of her sons (not Anthony) and an artistic young man to the United States. She was planning to join a friend of hers who was a mover in setting up the utopian community in Harmony, Indiana, but the place turned out to be squalid, and she didn't stay long. Fanny spent most of her time in the U.S. in Cincinnati and in her book is very hard on the city and its inhabitants. She especially objected to the pigs' role as garbage collectors. (In those days, pigs roamed the streets freely, like sheep grazing.) Fanny felt most of the people she encountered were loud, dirty, vulgar, and fanatically patriotic. It is her vivid descriptions of the physical conditions and the people that give this book its historical and entertainment value.While she was living in Cinci, she opened a retail emporium and filled it with rather shoddy merchandise sent from England by her husband. She also attempted to bring culture to the inhabitants. Not surprisingly, both ventures failed.After Mrs. Trollope returned to England, she supported her family by writing novels that were quite popular at the time, though they haven't become the classics her son's have. She spent her final years living in Italy with another son and his wife.

Very entertaining read of the author's trip through 19th Century America, full of wonderful description and enlightening observations. Despite the griping below, Mrs Trollope simply reports what she sees - men spitting tobacco on the floor, ladies off in another room while the guys have a good time, etc. She reports accurately on our forefathers' rugged pioneer spirit, but points out the lack of education everywhere. We want to shout "lies!" but Mark Twain wrote about the same thing, and the aspects of our society that haven't changed much are still being commented on with the same frankness by writers like Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, Dawn Powell, Paul Theroux and Joan Didion. Many true-hearted Americans will enjoy this book no end. Mrs Trollope clearly loved America and simply wrote truthfully about; she is simply beholden to no one - the essence of good writing. A thoroughly refreshing read.

This is an extremely entertaining commentary on American manners and well written. I agree, however, with Mrs. Trollope's son, Anthony, who commented that Mrs. Trollope is a keen observer but she understands little. Certainly her complaints about the lack of gentility among Americans is valid but she completely missed the wonderful lack of class restraints endemic to English society which afforded Americans "class mobility"--freedom of opportunity (except for native Americans and slaves).

Frances Trollope was a well-educated and by our standards snobbish Englishwoman who visited the United States in the early part of the 19th century. Her perceptive and caustic insights into the American character remain fresh and surprisingly timeless, as well as being lucid and elegant. The book became a best-seller in England; Mrs. Trollope's son Anthony was so inspired by his mother's success that he became an author himself. Anyone interested in American history needs to read this book, which offers a point of view not often presented on this side of the Atlantic in a style that's a pleasure to read.

The book was written in the 1830's by an astute Victorian observer. It was hugely successful in England and received with horror in America, and unavailable in the U.S. for over a hundred years. This book made Fanny Trollope's career and she supported her family as a writer for the rest of her working life. The failings of American society and America's system of government are illuminated scathingly, and the amazing thing is that the observations made 150 years ago are still valid now. Topics discusse