Domestic Manners of the Americans

Frances Milton Trollope (10 March 1779 - 6 October 1863)
was an English novelist and writer who published as Mrs. Trollope or Mrs. Frances Trollope. Her first book, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) has been the best known, but she also published strong social novels: an anti-slavery novel said to influence the work of the American Harriet Beecher Stowe, the first industrial novel, and two anti-Catholic novels that used a Protestant position to examine self-making. Recent scholars note that modernist critics tended to exclude women writers such as Frances Trollope from serious consideration. Her detractors familiarly called her by the diminutive Fanny Trollope, considered slightly vulgar, and discounted her prolific production; but her onetime notoriety can nevertheless perhaps be judged from the way The New Monthly Magazine in 1839 claimed that "No other author of the present day has been at once so read, so much admired, and so much abused"
Content The book created a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, as Frances Trollope had a caustic view of the Americans and found America 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 disgusted by slavery, of which she saw relatively little as she stayed in the South only briefly, and by the popularity of tobacco chewing, and the consequent spitting, even on carpets.
Her views were understandable for a number of reasons. It had been only 15 years since the United Kingdom was at war with the United States and the earlier American Revolutionary War was still remembered; as her own views on church, politics and social values were overtly conservative, she did not feel at ease with much in American religion, government and culture; and while in America she was unhappy as a result of financial and marital difficulties.