I used the 1949 Borzoi edition edited by Donald Smalley
with excellent introduction, notes, and index.
How nice to see such a volume from a trade publisher! Parenthetical notes provide page references
to this edition, some of these providing the source for several successive
quotations. For the convenience of those
with other editions, I append a list of the page numbers cited in parentheses matched
to the chapters in which each quotation may be found.
Frances
Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) fed British
curiosity about the United States. Her
book sold well, ameliorating for a time her chronic financial straits. She shared with her predecessor Capt. Basil Hall
who had published Travels in North America in 1829 and her follower Capt.
Frederick Marryat whose Diary in America appeared in 1839 a satirical
view, mingling more or less informative descriptions with lampoons of American
behavior calculated to flatter Old World readers.
Trollope deployed
modesty tropes to deny her ambition to do anything beyond a journalistic recording
what was before her eyes. How could a
lady like herself be expected to critique economics or even to write a
professionally florid rhetoric? Though
this pose is faux naïf considering her constant wry irony and arch
commentary, she did sketch recognizable features of American life which have little
changed since her day.
She repeatedly
stresses Americans’ obsession with money, noting how pursuit of wealth is the
universal goal and the sole index of success.
She showily deplores this single-minded fascination with money which leads
naturally to a philistine indifference to the arts. She readily concedes American “activity and
perseverance in all kinds of speculations, handicraft, and enterprise, which
promise a profitable pecuniary result.” An
Englishman who had long lived in the United States tells her he never heard an
American conversation which did not include the word “DOLLAR” (her
capitalization). “This sordid object,”
she goes on, “must inevitably produce a sordid tone of mind,” which she
proceeds to prove by examples Yankee sharp dealing. (301)
A critic might note that much of the world
is likewise chasing after prosperity, but for Mrs. Trollope life in the United
States was next to unendurable, though she endured more than three years in
this country. According to her, much of
the landscape was literally under a miasma, resulting in chronic “ague and
fever.” (33) Cincinnati in particular
she found “far from healthy.” (84) Walking
in woodlands, she finds not beauty but “congeries of leaves that have been
rotting since the flood” which “infect the air.” (42) She describes small farmers as living in barbaric
isolation like Polyphemus suffering material want and a total lack of social
relations, all of which they accept gladly simply in order to avoid ever
saying, “God save the king!” (49-50)
“Never,” she says, has she seen “human nature reduced so low.” (21)
Whether rural Americans
were in fact different from peasants in any part of the world is surely
questionable. However, Trollope did
accurately identify two central contradictions at the base of this country: the
treatment of native peoples and of Africans and their descendants. She refers to Indian policy as “base, cruel,
and most oppressive,” “treacherous and false almost beyond belief” (221) and
denounces the “avarice and intemperance of the white men” in dealing with the
aboriginal tribes. (330)
On the issue of
slavery, she had come to America considering this “peculiar institution,” as
Calhoun called it, “essentially wrong,”
(186) a sentiment she shared with many of her fellow-countrymen since the
United Kingdom had turned from being the greatest engine of the slave trade to
its greatest opponent. Treating people
as chattel, she realized, “strikes painfully against every feeling of justice,
mercy, or common humanity.” (246)
Anti-slavery motifs are prominent as well in her novel Jonathan
Jefferson Whitlaw (1836).
Yet her attitude toward the monstrous
institution is ambivalent, consistently muted and often undercut by her own
words. She makes light of her own
sentimental sympathy for the first slave she encounters, musing “How very
childish does ignorance make us! and how
very ignorant we are upon almost every subject, when hear-say evidence is all
we can get!” (9) Presumably with little
experience of the treatment of field workers, she declares that “the condition
of domestic slaves . . . does not appear to be bad.” Their owners often give
them “much kindly attention.” Not only
are they “tolerably well fed, and decently clothed,” “rarely exposed to the
lash, and . . . carefully nursed in sickness,” they receive these benefits in
spite of the fact that their mode of living “seems a matter of great
indifference to them.” (245)
She praises the
“sedulous attention” with which underlings look after her in slave states, (185)
making a dramatic contrast her experience of free American hired help whom she
finds impossible, “poor wretches” tormented as by “a sore, angry, and wakeful
pride.” She concluded that her servant
was miserable because she had “heard a thousand and a thousand times that she
was as good as any other lady, that all men were equal, and women, too.” (53-4)
Thus the root of America’s problems is, for
Trollope no mystery. She traces all of the
country’s ills, its deficiencies in the arts and education, its vulgarity, so
repulsive to her finer sensibilities, to the democratic form of
government. In her view “common sense”
revolts at the “mischievous sophistry,” that “false and futile axiom” “all men
are created equal.” For this fatal
national foundation she blames Thomas Jefferson whom she rightly labels a
hypocrite for his keeping slaves (and with them engendering children).
(71) His “hollow and unsound” doctrines
“would make of mankind an unamalgamated mass of grating atoms.” (316)
However, her
political point is misleading. In fact
her fundamental criticism is less political than social and aesthetic, though the
causes are mingled since for her Americans’ disagreeable manners arise from
their ill-advised system of government.
In part of course
Trollope’s attitudes are national ones, arising from British pride and
suggesting the superiority often claimed for Europe over the young country,
reinforced by British rivalries in the Revolution and the War of 1812. Her argument for a stratified, even a
semi-feudal, society is one that many, including some Americans, would have
made in her era. The issue of democratic
reform was certainly much discussed in the United Kingdom. The Reform bill of
1832 had expanded the franchise by fifty percent, but, as a net worth of £10
remained a requirement, more than four-fifths of the male population still
could not vote, and agitation continued, sometimes violently repressed. Those favoring more progressive political
ideas often looked across the Atlantic, while those defending the status quo
found negative examples in the same place.
While hers may
have seemed the voice of the ordinary respectable Briton, her own class status
was more unstable than her readers probably suspected. The daughter of a clergyman, she had been
well-educated and made a middle-class marriage to a barrister, yet she was
never wealthy, and, when her husband proved a failure both in his law practice
and his attempts to farm some leased property, the family found themselves in
serious financial straits. More than
once they were evicted, with sheriff’s agents dragging their belongings to the
street. Following the American sojourn,
the Trollopes moved permanently to the Continent to escape debt collectors and
imprisonment.
Frances Trollope
soon realized that she would be more likely than her husband to generate a
decent income, and her residence in the United States was part of a scheme to
launch a business on the Western frontier.
Though the shop did not last long, her book turned out to be her
salvation, proving so popular that she was able to continue writing and in fact to support herself with her pen,
eventually publishing something like a hundred volumes and in her later years
enjoying a prominent position among the English expatriates in Florence.
Frances Trollope,
though, disclaimed political theory. “I
am in no way competent to judge the political institutions of America, and, if
I should occasionally make an observation on their effects, as they meet my
superficial glance, they will be made in the spirit, and with the feeling of a
women, who is apt to tell what her first impressions may be, but unapt to
reason back from effects to their causes.”
(47) Nonetheless, she thought a
tour of the United States would be enough to cure any English radical of
sedition. (44)
With such
decidedly anti-democratic attitudes, she seems an unlikely emigrant, but she
arrived under the influence of Frances Wright and, less directly, Robert Owen,
whose principles were nothing short of radical.
Her horror at the sight of the ramshackle Nashoba Commune (which she had
referred to as Miss Wright’s “estate” [14]) arose not from Wright’s egalitarian
ideals which entailed utopian socialism, free love, and rejection of
Christianity, but the “desolation” (27) and lack of fresh food. Apart from the expectation of making money by
establishing a business on the Western frontier, she had liked the idea that
her children could be educated at her friend’s school free of charge. Though she ridicules Owen and others
associated with the New Harmony Commune such as William Maclure and Mme.
Fretageot (10) and found even her dear friend Frances Wright in the wilds of
America to have nothing whatever in common with “the Miss Wright I had known
and admired in London and Paris” (27), she seemed to feel no reservations about
casting her lot with them.
If her class
pride served her poorly in Nashoba where she rebelled against a diet of corn bread
and rain water (28), it likewise proved her undoing in Cincinnati. Without going into the details that
biographers have recorded, it is sufficient here to say that she stumbled from
one project to another, meaning to earn her living by her taste. She became involved with the Western Museum,
an institution that mixed natural history exhibits with side show attractions,
becoming a key figure in designing one of its more popular exhibits, a
room-size view of Hell populated by wax figures of the damned. This show ran for twenty-five years, often the
prime support of the Museum. Another
exhibit that appealed to the taste of the town was the “Invisible Girl,” voiced
by her son Henry, posing as a spirit who would speak to paying visitors. Located at the end of a spooky corridor, the
“Invisible Girl” supported the Museum for decades.
Saying that
Cincinnati needed a dome, Trollope invested her family’s limited resources in
constructing on Third Street an exotic edifice which included Moorish and Egyptian
decoration as well as a dome. In a city
where livestock ran in the streets, e she meant to establish a cultural center
with a coffeehouse, an “elegant Saloon” for refreshments, a bar room, an
exhibition gallery, and a ballroom, as well as a bazaar for upscale goods. Perhaps she was not as sharp a trader as she
describes Americans as being, but her entrepreneurial effort was unsuccessful,
and the establishment closed. She continued
to try to make her artistic judgement marketable. She staged musical and dramatic events,
always thinking that she could be the missionary, bringing fashion and beauty
to a benighted region.
As with others
clinging to gentility by their fingertips, for Trollope social forms became
exceedingly important. All she had was
her education, her wit, her taste and refinement which she emphasizes at every
opportunity. To her democracy’s worst
sin is its ugliness. Her recoil from her
crude surroundings is the sign of her superiority. Ignoring the brutal lives of English workers
at the time, she is horrified at their American cousins. To her it is the “higher” human wants (45)
which cannot be satisfied in the United States due to the people’s “lack of
refinement.” (47). It is civilized
leisure that she looks for in vain. “I
never saw people who lived so much without amusement as the Cinncinatians”; it
is a “triste little town,” (74) she says, deploying her French as evidence of
her own cultivation. She wonders
encounters a German woman who laments, “They do not love music. Oh no!
and they never amuse themselves, -- no, and their hearts are not warm .
. .they have no ease.” (266) She wonders
how, in such a barbaric place, taste might ever be formed. “How can a correct and polished style, even
of speaking, be acquired?” (328) Alas,
she concludes Americans have certainly “not the same besoin of being amused.”
(339)
Her fundamental
objections are matters of taste. She
attacks America for its want of “polish” (46) and “chivalry,” “the unbought
grace of life.” (257) Though an American
can satisfy animal wants “profusely” and “at a very easy rate,” “there is no
charm, no grace.” “I very seldom during
my whole stay in the country heard a sentence elegantly turned, and correctly
pronounced from the lips of an American.”
(45)
With almost shocking
ease, she looks past the monstrous historical inequities to conclude that the
single most offensive aspect of American life is the men’s “incessant,
remorseless” use of chewing tobacco.
(16) To her the habitual use of
this “loathsome herb” has literally deformed the faces of Americans’ lips,
lending them a “remarkable peculiarity.” (234)
Adding to the Americans’ grotesque appearance is the sprawling posture
in which they dispose themselves over chairs and other furniture, sitting in
“the most unseemly attitudes” (226) even in settings where greater gentility
might be expected such as the theater or even the Congress.
When her fellow
passengers on a riverboat are not “gambling and wrangling,” (17) they eat
dinner with a “total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the
voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured, the strange
uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the
contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the
frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to
enter the mouth, and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth with
a pocket knife.” (18-19) She finds
her steamboat accommodations worse than
“the apartment of a party of well conditioned pigs.” (16)
Just as the
problem with democracy in her view is not so much that it is unworkable or
unjust as that it produces ugliness.
Similarly, she is horrified at fundamentalist religious practices,
describing with horror, revivals, camp meetings, and prayer sessions in private
homes. She finds the religious
enthusiasm he observes in America to be “frightful” (80) and “detestable”
(81). A service makes her “sick with
horror” (172). To her the guarantee of
respectability offered by a national church more than compensates for any loss
of freedom of conscience. She simply
finds American spirituality to be in poor taste.
For a good
portion of her career Frances Trollope might have seemed a prisoner of her
class identity, stubbornly looking for something in the United States that the
country did not offer. Everywhere she
looked, the sights of the Western frontier disgusted her. She was attracted to a life-style she could
often not afford and, while ridiculing the taste of Cincinnatians who could not
appreciate true works of art, she nonetheless curated shows of hokey magic and
wax figures to try to turn a profit. Yet
her snobbery triumphed in the end. It
was specifically her distaste for the rough raw life she saw around her that
made her Domestic Manners of the Americans a best-seller, and launched
her on a very productive and sufficiently profitable writing career and landed
her eventually where she had always wanted to be, in a fashionable set of her
fellow-countrymen in the prestigious and highly artistic city of Florence.
The following list identifies the chapter in which each
of the cited page numbers is located in the Borzoi edition.
14 II
16 II
17 III
18-19 III
21 III
27 III
33 IV
42 IV
44 V
45 V
46 V
47 V
49-50 V
53-4 VI
71 VII
74 VIII
84 IX
186 XVII
221 XX
226 XX
234 XX
246 XXII
257 XXIII
266 XXV
301 XXVIII
316 XXIX
328 XXIX
330 XXIX
339 XXX
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