Domestic Manners of the Americans

Fanny reports accurately about our forefathers' harsh pioneer character, and points out the lack of education everywhere. For example, men spitting tobacco on the floor, ladies off in another room while the guys have a good time, etc. Fanny felt most of the people she encountered were loud, dirty, vulgar, and devotedly patriotic. The personality of our society hasn’t changed much, and is still being commented on with the same frankness as Fanny, by other writers like Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, Dawn Powell, Paul Theroux and Joan Didion. It is her dramatic descriptions of the physical conditions and the people that give this book its historical value. Mrs. Trollope clearly loved America, and simply wrote truthfully about it. She is obliged to no one, which makes for truthful and impartial writing. Fanny Trollope was the mother of Anthony Trollope, an English novelist of the nineteenth century.

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