Domestic Manners of the Americans.

TROLLOPE, Frances Milton.

$750.00

Item Number: 131559

London: Printed for Whitaker, Treacher, & Co, 1832.

First edition of Frances Trollope’s wildy popular and highly controversial work on America and Americans. Octavo, bound in three quarter morocco with gilt titles and tooling to the spine, marbled endpapers, top edge gilt, illustrated with 24 lithographed plates by Ducôtes after drawings by Hervieu. In very good condition. Bookplate.

Trollope's 1832 memoir of her travels through America with her son Henry created a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic upon publication. In it, she voiced, without hesitancy, a caustic view of Americans, whom she found 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. Trollope was also harshly critical of slavery of African Americans in the United States, and by the popularity of tobacco chewing, and the consequent spitting, even on carpets. The book was both highly controversial and highly successful, selling "like wildfire". It also enabled its author to become a wage-earner and save her family from penury. American author 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."