Domestic Manners of the Americans

Frances Trollope, painted by Auguste Hervieu

In 1827 Frances Trollope — the mother of novelist Anthony Trollope — brought three of her children to the young United States. She stayed for four years, spending much of the time in the frontier city of Cincinnati. Then she went home and wrote a book about it: Domestic Manners of the Americans. It was a best seller in England, but the Americans hated it.

I have prepared a slide-show presentation about Francis Trollope and her book — and very opinionated she was. I have also put in a little bit about Charles Dickens and his American Notes , written just 10 years later.

Click here for the slide show.

Charles Dickens, American Notes

The full title of Dickens’ report on the 1842 United States is American Notes for General Circulation. In case you do not recognize the pun — I didn’t — it’s a play on “notes” as money for general circulation, possibly counterfeit.

Dickens’ reports of his own circulation is chronological, so we hear a lot about the difficulties of travel, whether by ocean ship, river boat, stage coach or (early) train. Some food was good, but most was awful. Some hotels were clean and provided good service; many were dirty and disgusting. Many cities met with his approval; some did not. He does not report a brave new world. He reports acceptable eastern cities, a crude frontier, and too much spitting everywhere.

The Senate is a dignified and decorous body, and its proceedings are conducted with much gravity and order. Both houses are handsomely carpeted; but the state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon with which every honourable members is accommodated, and the extraordinary improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon it in every direction do not admit of being described.

But he does describe in numerous passages. When Frances Trollope reported on the infant U.S. 15 years earlier in Domestic Manners of the Americans, she made the same points about spitting. Those who did not chew tobacco in the 19th century had the same distaste for those who did as non-smokers do for smokers today.

Has anything changed since Trollope’s visit? Both travelers had difficulty with the social familiarity of the people of the young republic. They also missed the assurance of an established religion, with its comfortable assumptions about the social order.

Wherever religion is resorted to, as a strong drink, and as an escape from the dull monotonous round of home, those of its ministers who pepper the highest will be the surest to please.

Dickens is Dickens, and he is fun to read. In Boston,

The ladies are unquestionably very beautiful — in face: but there I am compelled to stop. Their education is  much as with us; neither better nor worse. I had heard some very marvelous stories in this respect; but not believing them, was not disappointed.

What is the point? As social comedy it is a good read, and we learn that river boat food is bad and that frontier life is both crude and dull. Like Trollope, Dickens is repelled by spitting and detests slavery. His disappointment with the democratic experiment is real, but his analysis is superficial.

What I Read in March 2012

The Journals of John Cheever (edited by Robert Gottlieb). Cheever, as we meet him in these Journals is impossible to like, but equally impossible not to admire as a writer. I read on, almost against my will, but fascinated by a life with so many years of unhappiness turned into art.

Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk. Free at last! After over 700 pages of this World War I Czech classic in which our hero never fires a shot. For my comments, see here, and here, and here.

Eileen Bigland, The Indomitable Mrs. Trollope. Appreciative biography of the author of Domestic Manners of the Americans and the mother of novelist Anthony Trollope. Frances Trollope led three of her children off to seek their fortune in the American wilderness of the 1820s and returned to write a best-selling book about her travels.

Rumer Godden, The Battle of The Villa Fiorita. Two children pursue their divorced mother to Italy. They “battle” to bring her back to their former family life in England. Godden’s touch with fictional children and foreign places is light and sure. As for the battle, it may be that when you win, you may lose.

Anthony Trollope, The American Senator. I love to treat myself to a new Trollope from time to time. I enjoyed this one greatly, as Anthony Trollope reverses his mother’s trip to the United States with the fictional visit of an American senator to England. Fox hunting and husband hunting dominate the action.

Natsume Soseki, Kokoro. This Japanese novel was published in 1914, and “kokoro” means “the heart of things” or “feelings.” I had trouble engaging with this story of a young man and his feelings for his contemporary friend and his somewhat-older sensei, or master. I had just come from reading Trollope, with its characters so specifically described that you know their income, the furniture in their houses, their professions, and the names of their horses. Here we have people who attend the university and have different fields of study, but we don’t know what they are. They have ambitions, but we don’t know what those are either. And they have secret pasts which, when revealed, had very little impact on me, the reader, although clearly important to the characters in the novel.

Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life. I can’t seem to let John Cheever go. After reading The Journals of John Cheever, I moved on to Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life, a full-bore biography of the short-story writer and novelist. The two books complement each other wonderfully.

Barbara Pym, An Academic Question. This novel, by the writer of Excellent Women and Quartet in Autumn, was assembled from two unfinished drafts after Pym’s death. It was a worthy effort, but the book misses the quiet assurance of her other books. The social humor seems strained and obvious. Sorry.

A Hunting We Will Go

Why does the cover of Anthony Trollope’s novel The American Senator show a very English hunting scene? I haven’t read the last two-thirds of the book yet, but Part I is very much about hunting. The gentry, accompanied by those local farmers who can afford to participate, hunt the fox. Although men predominate, both sexes participate. At the same time — and in related times and places — English women hunt for suitable husbands.

Arabella Trefoil is about to settle for whatever husband she can find:

“I’ll tell you what it is, mamma. I’ve been at it till I’m nearly broken down. I must settle somewhere; — or else die; — or else run away. I can’t stand this any longer and I won’t. Talk of work, — men’s work! What man ever has to work as I do?” I wonder which was the hardest part of that work, the hair-dressing and painting and companionship of the lady’s maid or the continual smiling upon unmarried men to whom she had nothing to say and for whom she did not in the least care!

Arabella must perform this work because her father has squandered his money and there are no job opportunities for respectable women in Victorian England. At least Arabella’s hunting will be remunerative, if she succeeds, whereas people hunt the fox just for the pleasure of it. A local farmer objects to the joyful process, and the visiting American Senator tries to understand.

“If I comprehend the matter rightly, he was on his own land when we saw him.”

“Yes; — that was his own field.”

“And they meant to ride across it whether he liked it or no?”

“Everybody rides across everybody’s land out hunting.”

“Would they ride across your park, Mr. Morton, if you didn’t let them?”

“Certainly they would, — and break down all my gates if I had them locked, and pull my park palings to let the hounds through.”

Other English customs bother the Senator also. For example, why does the rector receive 800 lbs a year for doing nothing, giving 100 lbs of this to a curate to actually perform the work?

Then he ascertained that Mr. Puttock [the rector] had not been presented, or selected for the living on account of any peculiar fitness; — but that he had been a fellow of Rufford at Oxford till he was forty-five, when he thought it well to marry and take a living.

It’s a neat trick, The American Senator. In the 1820s, Anthony Trollope’s mother, Frances Trollope, famously made a trip to the young United States and wrote a book about it. She criticized the way of life she found. Some matters she did not understand. Of others, she was too impatient with the adversities of pioneer life. Social habits of no great harm — total strangers addressed her without an introduction — went against her standards of gentility. When all that is stripped away, some of her objections were true and justified — and that stung. What with the British being pleased and the Americans being angry, she sold a lot of books.

Now here comes son Anthony and turns the table. The American comes to England. He observes, he fails to understand, he criticizes. It’s an old fictional technique, and it works. William Dean Howells used it in A Traveler from Altruria and Aldous Huxley similarly gave us the Savage in Brave New World.

Anthony Trollope called himself “a hunting man.” After he transferred his Post Office job to Ireland, riding to hounds became a passion with him. He said that he could have married sooner but he had to pay for his horses first. Still, he can see the absurd side of hunting the fox, so he lets the American Senator say it for him. And hunting the husband? Ask me about that when I have finished the book.

What I Read in February 2012

Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum. Oskar refuses to grow after age three, when he begins to play his toy tin drum. It speaks for him during the rise of Nazism, the war years, and the postwar turmoil of a divided Germany.

Scott Turow, Innocent. I enjoy Turow’s legal thrillers because they hold you with puzzles, not violence. Innocent is one of the thrillers in the series devoted to Rusty Sabich and Sandy Stern, lawyers in Kindle County aka Chicago. It has more plot twists than a pretzel and I could not put it down.

Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk. I am posting on each part of this book as I complete it. Part I – Behind the Lines. Svejk is in the World War I Austro Hungarian army, but not yet in battle. His struggles are with the military itself. Part II – At the Front. Svejk is not actually at the front, just continuing his long bureaucratically-obstructed journey toward that destination.

Margaret Drabble, The Sea Lady. Two people, a man and a woman, journey back to a place of their childhood. They meet there a third person from that time. A bit heavy on reminiscence and coincidence, but a good read for those of us who are looking back at our own reflections.

Angela Thirkell, The Brandons. Lavinia Brandon is rich widow, fond of her children and a bit silly. Everyone around her finds her absolutely charming, as do I. Just the person to spend a giggly afternoon with in 1939 Bartsetshire.

Sandford Salyer, Marmee: The Mother of Little Women. This rather informally written biography of Louisa May Alcott’s mother tells the story of the Alcott family as Abigail May Alcott (Abba) experienced it.

Edmund White, Fanny: A Fiction. Yes, a fiction. Loosely based on Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, this book is not quite a novel and not quite a biography either. Mostly true to the historical facts, it invents incidents in Frances Trollope’s life, to no particular point that I could see.

Flannery O’Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge. This collection of nine short stories, published after O’Connor’s death is my first experience with her work. The stories are skillfully wrought and intentionally disturbing.

Angela Thirkell, Before Lunch. Another cheerful muddle in the Bartsetshire series. Breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner are all important. That’s where people meet, talk, misunderstand. Some lovers head down the wrong path, but most matters are resolved before lunch.

Katharine Weber, Objects in Mirror Are Closer than They Appear. Two American women, Harriet and Anne, share an apartment in Geneva. The arrangement is temporary. They were roommates before, but now things have changed. Some objects in the mirror are indeed closer, too close.

Edmund White, Fanny

The title of Edmund White’s novel is Fanny: A Fiction. Who is Fanny and where is the fiction? We have two Fannies. The popular female name Frances was “Fanny” in the 19th century. In this “fiction” Frances Trollope (Fanny) is supposedly writing a biography of Frances Wright (Fanny). But it’s not really a biography, and it’s not really about Fanny Wright, but Fanny Trollope mostly talking about herself.

Intrigued by tales told about the (real) Frances Trollope’s account of her visit to the early United States, I recently enjoyed her Domestic Manners of the Americans. I followed it up with a real biography, Pamela Neville-Sington’s Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman. This led me to sample the (real) Frances Trollope’s novel The Widow Barnaby. A good time was had by all. Frances Trollope was resourceful, enterprising, hard working and smart. She led three of her children off to the United States in the 1820s. From this misguided adventure she derived a best-selling book and a subsequent career during which she wrote 35 books in 24 years.

I cannot find this (real) Frances Trollope in White’s Fanny: A Fiction. I find a fussy old woman who comments and then comments on her comments.

Like Byron he laughed at ordinary human limitations — a bit easier to pull off if one is a rich English aristocrat rather than a poor French orphan. [Eliminate nationalities? Illogical?]

Some of her remarks are elaborated by a really irritating editor who fortunately disappears during the second half of the book. While many of the events are historical, White adds characters and incidents to spice up his tale. Fanny is given a very improbable romance in Cincinnati and the two Fannies go off together to newly-independent Haiti. Fanny Wright, the supposed subject of the book comes and goes, a goddess ex machina who never fails to produce disaster. If there was any real affection between the two women, it is not apparent here. Fanny herself (this unreal Fanny, that is) recognizes this at the end of the book.

I am afraid now that my mind is clouding over more and more rapidly and I judge this manuscript to be an unshapely muddle. There is too much spite in it, the best passages must be censored and Fanny herself remains irritatingly elusive.

Her mind is not cloudy — this judgement is entirely correct.

What I Read in January 2012

My View While Reading

Two weeks in Florida treated me to more time to read but left me short on computer access to keep up with my posts. This tree was my best view from my reading chair when I lifted my eyes from the page on a sunny afternoon.

H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay. I begin the new year with this non-science-fiction novel by the author of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Tono-Bungay is a tonic, a harmless patent medicine for the masses and the basis for a fortune which does do great harm in pre-World War I England.

Ngaio Marsh, Artists in Crime. An Inspector Alleyn mystery in which he meets attractive artist Agatha Troy. I knew, from reading later books in the series, that they marry — but not here, not yet. They meet. They are mutually attracted, he solves the crime. I am confident they will get together sooner or later. Wait for the next book.

Jane Smiley, At Paradise Gate. I am an admirer of Jane Smiley and her deft handling of the problems of (mostly) normal people. An old man, a partner in a long-term, often stressful marriage, lies dying. The daughters and a granddaughter gather. The wife copes.

Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture. This book derives from the “last lecture” delivered by Randy Pausch, while living in his last months with pancreatic cancer.

Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans. Fanny Trollope was the mother of the better-known Anthony Trollope and a successful writer in her own right. In 1827 she took several of her children to seek their fortune in the New World. She was both fascinated and disappointed by the new republic. Her observations, often relieved with a little humor, scandalized us all.

Emile Zola, Germinal. This disturbing novel depicts the lives of coal miners in 1860s France and their unsuccessful strike for better conditions and pay. Free-market capitalism justifies all, then and now.

John LeCarré, A Most Wanted Man. I have long admired John LeCarré and his intricately-plotted spy novels, but I am sorry that I read this one. It left me angry at the abuse of power by all sides in our current War on Terror.

Frances Trollope, The Widow Barnaby. Since Fanny Trollope, best known for her critical Domestic Manners of the Americans, was a best-selling novelist in her day, I thought I would try one. The widow is flirtatious, maritally ambitious, outrageous — and dresses in poor taste. What will she do next! Trollope knew a thing or two about keeping the reader involved.

W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk. Pioneering sociologist DuBois depicts the situation of Blacks in the South forty years after Emancipation. “Souls” are not just the spiritual souls, but the entire consciousness of a people who, after centuries of slavery, receive little support in the freedom they have gained.

Pamela Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman. Fanny Trollope is best known for her critique of the young United States, Domestic Manners of the Americans. It was her first published book, and she was 53. In the next 24 years she wrote six travel books and 35 novels. They were best sellers in their day. Oh, and she was the mother of Anthony Trollope. This well-written biography tells all.

The Widow Barnaby

This grief-stricken widow in full mourning dress is not the Widow Barnaby. Our widow left town so that people in her new location would not know how long she had been a widow. She remodeled her black dresses for her penniless niece — let her do the mourning for both of them.

The Widow Barnaby (1839) was probably the most popular of Frances “Fanny” Trollope’s 35 novels. Trollope — also the mother of Anthony Trollope, among other accomplishments –is best remembered today for The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) which reported critically on her travels in the early United States.

I learned that she was a best-selling author in her day, but “nobody reads her now.” That hardly seems fair, so I tried The Widow Barnaby and was pleasantly surprised as Trollope kept me fully engaged in the adventures of the rambunctiously vulgar widow.

Martha Compton, the daughter of a well-born but improvident family, had failed to secure a more desirable suitor by her mid-thirties, so she settled for comfortable local apothecary Barnaby. When he died, she was his childless widow and inherited a comfortable income of over 400 pounds per year. Like her contemporary, Jane Austin, Trollope tells you exactly how much money people have and what it means to them. With this income, the Widow Barnaby was confident she could aspire to great things, that is, a more prestigious second husband. Romance is important, but has its limits.

Yet Mrs. Barnaby was not altogether so short-sighted as by-standers might suppose; and though she freely permitted herself the pleasure of being made love to, she determined to be very sure of the Major’s rent-roll before she bestowed herself and her fortune upon him; for, notwithstanding her flirting propensities, the tender passion had ever been secondary in her heart to a passion for wealth and finery; and not the best-behaved and most discreet dowager that ever lived, was more firmly determined to take care of herself, and make a good bargain, “if ever she married again,” than was our flighty, flirting Widow Barnaby.

Martha Barnaby decks herself out in laces and feathers, rouges her cheeks, and lies about her age and antecedents. Into the novel Trollope also weaves the story of a very different member of the family, Miss Betsy Compton. Aunt Betsy never married, but lives contentedly, preserving her share of the estate that the Widow Barnaby’s father let slip away.

This mystery, this profound secrecy, in the silent rolling up of her wealth, was perhaps the principal source of her enjoyment from it. It amused her infinitely to observe, that while the bad management and improvidence of her brother and his wife were the theme of eternal gossipings, her own thrift seemed permitted to go quietly on, without eliciting any observation at all.

The two women clash over the care of their penniless niece. As a good Victorian novelist, Trollope is careful not carry her mocking of romance too far. Aunt Betsey lives happily without it, the Widow Barnaby seeks it if accompanied by a good income, and niece Agnes suffers the conventional pangs of sincere love.

Agnes stood up, she received his offered hand, and raised her eyes to his face, but uttered no word either of surprise or joy. Her face was colourless, and traces of very recent tears were plainly visible; she trembled from head to foot, and Colonel Hubert, frightened, as a brave man always is when he sees a woman really sinking under her sex’s weakness, replaced her on the sofa almost as incapable of speaking as herself.

The novel is an entertaining mixture of the fainting Agnes, set off by two strong women who know their own minds. Financial troubles are real, not glossed over at all. The male characters are less well-drawn than the female ones, but Trollope clearly knows the neighborhoods and local customs she depicts. No wonder people bought her books — she is fun to read.

This book can be hard to find, but you can get a free copy in the Amazon Kindle Store.