Domestic Manners of the Americans

In 1827, Frances Milton Trollope sailed for America with three of her children and a young French artist, fleeing debts and a husband slowly poisoned by mercury. She dreamed of joining a utopian community of freed slaves in Indiana. What she found instead was disaster: illness, scandal, and a failed general store in Cincinnati, then a muddy frontier town. Yet this tale of personal ruin became one of the nineteenth century's most electrifying travel books. Trollope turns her sharp British eye on everything from the grotesque inequalities of slavery to the bizarre customs of a young republic convinced of its own superiority. Her descriptions of New Orleans' oppressive heat, the bleak Mississippi banks, and the crude manners of Americans who seemed to have invented neither shame nor restraint sparked fury across the Atlantic. The book made her famous, but it also cemented a transatlantic rivalry that persists to this day: the Americans have never quite forgiven her, which is perhaps the highest compliment a satirist can receive.