Domestic Manners of the Americans was published by Whittaker, Treacher in London in 1832 and made Frances Trollope instantly famous — and infamous. Written after nearly four years in the United States (1827–1831), most of them in Cincinnati, the book is a sustained critique of American society from the perspective of an educated, middle-class Englishwoman who found democratic culture vulgar, provincial, and hypocritical.
Trollope’s criticisms are detailed and merciless: she attacks the manners of the Americans (spitting, eating habits, the treatment of servants), their cultural pretensions (the inadequacy of American theater, art, and literature), their religious enthusiasm (the camp meetings horrify her), their treatment of women (simultaneously idealized and restricted), and above all their slavery (which she regards as an absolute refutation of their claims to love liberty). Her prose is witty, specific, and devastatingly observant — she has the novelist’s eye for the telling detail that encapsulates a larger truth.
The book caused a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans were furious — the book was publicly burned, and “Trollope” became a term of abuse meaning an unfairly critical foreigner. The British loved it, and its commercial success (it was an immediate bestseller) provided the financial rescue that Trollope desperately needed after the failure of her Cincinnati business ventures. More importantly, the book’s success launched her career as a professional writer — she went on to publish over forty novels and travel books in the next twenty-five years.
Mark Twain, Dickens, and countless subsequent commentators acknowledged Domestic Manners as one of the foundational documents of Anglo-American cultural relations: irritating, unfair in places, but containing enough truth to remain painful a century and a half later.
Collecting Domestic Manners of the Americans
First edition (Whittaker, Treacher, London, 1832): Two volumes, cloth boards. Published simultaneously with an American edition.
Market values:
- First London edition (2 vols): $500–$1500
- First American edition (1832): $300–$800
- Victorian reprints: $50–$150
- Modern scholarly editions: $15–$40