Fanny Trollope--whom Mary Shelley met before Trollope's literary fame commenced--wrote a book about her experiences in America--The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) ...
My journal
reminds me that I read Domestic Manners
in October 1999, somewhat early in my Shelley Mania, and some of the notes I
took on that book—her account of her experiences in America (and with
Americans) during the several years she was here, commencing in 1827.
Her ship
arrived in New Orleans, and she immediately complained about the heat, which was much more than agreeable and
the mosquitoes (incessant, and most
tormenting). She notes that a crocodile ate an entire family. She describes
a fire-and-brimstone preacher: The
perspiration ran in streams from the face of the preacher; his eyes rolled, his
lips were covered with foam ….
She comments
caustically about Americans and their leisure: All the freedom enjoyed in America, beyond what is enjoyed in England,
is enjoyed by the disorderly at the expense of the orderly ….
She’s
saddened by the role(s) of women on the frontier—slaves of the soil, she calls them. But she has little kind to say
about women in the city. They powder
themselves immoderately, face, neck, and arms, with pulverised starch …. They
are also most unhappily partial to false hair, which they wear in surprising
quantities ….
Manifestly not impressed with the state of American
letters, she refers to the immense
exhalation of periodical trash … which is greedily sucked in by all ranks ….
The general taste is decidedly bad … Oh, and she refers to American writers
as insect authors.
And near the
end she blasts us all: If the citizens of
the United States were indeed the devoted patriots they call themselves, they
would surely not thus encrust themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion,
that they are the first and best of the human race, that nothing is to be
learnt, but what they are able to teach, and that nothing is worth having,
which they do not possess. The art of man could hardly discover a more
effectual antidote to improvement, than this persuasion ….
Seems as if
the We’re-Number-One! attitude reigned long ago, as well.[1]
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| my copy |
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