 | Domestic manners of the Americans |  |
INTRODUCTION TO NEW EDITION.
Anthony Trollope, in the second chapter of
his Autobiography, devotes two short paragraphs
to his mother's first and most famous book:
"In 1827 she went to America, having been
partly instigated by the social and communistic
ideas of a lady whom I well remember—a certain
Miss Wright[1]
—who was, I think, the first
of the American female lecturers. Her chief
desire, however, was to establish my brother
Henry; and perhaps joined with that was the
additional object of breaking up her English
home without pleading broken fortunes to all
the world. At Cincinnati, in the State of Ohio,
she built a bazaar, and I fancy lost all the money
which may have been embarked in that speculation.
It could not have been much, and I
think others also must have suffered; but she
looked about her, at her American cousins, and
resolved to write a book about them. This
book she brought back with her in 1831, and
published it early in 1832. When she did this
she was already fifty. When doing this she was
aware unless that she could so succeed in making
money, there was no money for any of the
family. She had never before earned a shilling.
She almost immediately received a considerable
amounting to two sums of £400 each within a
few months; and from that moment till nearly
the time of her death, at any rate, for more than
twenty years, she was in the receipt of a considerable
income from her writings. It was a
late age at which to begin such a career.
"The Domestic Manners of the Americans was
the first of a series of books of travels, of which
it was probably the best and certainly the best
known. It will not be too much to say of it
that it had a material effect upon the manners
of the Americans of the day, and that this effect
has been fully appreciated by them. No observer
was certainly ever less qualified to judge
of the prospects, or even of the happiness of a
young people. No one could have been worse
adapted by nature for the task of learning
whether a nation was in a way to thrive. Whatever
she saw she judged, as most women do,
from her own standing-point. If a thing was
ugly in her eyes, it ought to be ugly to all eyes
—and if ugly, it must be bad. What though
people have plenty to eat and clothes to wear,
if they put their feet upon the tables and do not
reverence their betters? The Americans were
to her rough, uncouth, and vulgar—and she
told them so. Those communistic and social
ideas which had been so pretty in a drawing room
were scattered to the winds. Her volumes
were very bitter; but they were very
clever, and they saved the family from ruin."
Mr. Trollope was mistaken in thinking his
mother's book the first of those written by English
others before it, such as those of Mr. Fawkes
and Mr. Fearon, and notably Captain Basil
Hall's Travels in North America, which had appeared
in 1829, and to whose reception in the
United States Mrs. Trollope herself devotes an
entire chapter;[2] but he is entirely justified in
regarding it (from a literary standpoint) as the
best. It is superior to the work of Captain
Hall, just mentioned. It is superior to Miss
Martineau's and to Captain Marryat's, both of
which followed it within a few years. It is even
superior to the American Notes of Dickens, in
spite of the pains that he bestowed upon this
record of his travels. And the reasons of this
superiority are not far to seek. Mrs. Trollope's
knowledge of the country was gained by residence
and by personal contact. She had spent
almost as many years in the United States as
the other writers had spent months; and she
had become intimately familiar with phases of
American life of which they knew absolutely
nothing. She was not a literary lion like Miss
Martineau, and for her, therefore, the people
whom she met were not her entertainers, and
the society that she found was not consciously
on show. Equally important is the fact that in
her narrative she made no attempt to pass upon
the government, the laws, the institutions, or
the politics of the country, but kept strictly to
the theme that gives the title to her book—the
domestic manners of the Americans. These she
with all a woman's keen appreciation of personal
description, and with a wealth of anecdote
and illustration, carefully garnered in the daily
intercourse of nearly four years.
It has almost always been taken for granted
that Mrs. Trollope's deliberate purpose in writing
her book was to vilify and caricature everything
American. Of such a purpose, however,
the book itself gives absolutely not a single indication.
The whole drift of what she wrote
is, of course, distinctly unfavourable; but it is
evidently set down with a distinctly honest purpose.
Mrs. Trollope herself, as her son has told
us, had come to America with a strong desire
to be pleased with what she was to find, being
something of a radical in her politics at home
and imbued with notions verging even upon
communism. That with this friendly predisposition,
she wrote so bitter a book is to be attributed
partly to the peculiarly feminine cast
of her mind, as set forth in the paragraphs just
quoted, but more largely to the circumstances
of her stay. She spent but little time in the
older and more settled portions of the country,
passing through them only on her journey
home. The New England States she never visited
at all. Her first and most lasting impressions
were formed in the course of her three
years' residence in Cincinnati. In 1827 Cincinnati
was a little town of some 20,000 inhabitants,
lying on the extreme western limits of our civilization.
Its real growth had begun only eleven
years before, with the opening of the Ohio to
from the centres of wealth and cultivation; it
was difficult of access, rude in appearance, and
with a population whose character was the logical
outcome of its environment. A refined and
luxury-loving woman, fond of social pleasures,
the friend of Mathias, Milman, and Miss Landon,
was suddenly transferred from a London
drawing-room to this little, raw backwoods-settlement,
the Ultima Thule of civilization, whose
very name was scarcely known in Europe, and
there forced by circumstances to seek a living
among men who drank whiskey, chewed tobacco,
and kept their hats on in her parlour, and
among women who entered her house uninvited,
and who habitually spoke of her as "the English
old woman." She could not see that this
roughness was only an incident of the early
stages of the social evolution of the West, and
was destined soon to pass away. She could not
recognize and admire the battle with nature
that was going on about her, the onward sweep
of material progress preparing the way for the
graces of life that would soon inevitably follow.
She was simply a woman who found everything
about her extremely uncongenial and repulsive,
and who saw only what was actually before her
eyes. The awkward manners, the high-pitched
voices, the hard, unlovely faces, the pig-killing,
the whiskey-drinking, the endless electioneering,
the greed for gain, the worship of "smartness,"
the uneasy self-consciousness that half
suspected its own crudity, the ignorance, the
bragging—all these things she saw, and with a
them stand to her as the necessary outcome of
democracy. To her they meant America.
Hence it is that while her picture is unfavourable,
it is, so far as it goes, a truthful picture.
She wrote of what she saw, and if she saw only
one side of the shield, it is because she was no
political or social philosopher, but only a woman,
with the keenest of vision for what lay upon
the surface, with a clever pen, and with a thoroughly
feminine mind. That she was willing to
admire as well as to condemn, there are many
passages in her book to show. She continually
dwells upon the beauty of the natural scenery.
She finds much to praise in the eastern towns,
especially New York and Baltimore. She
greatly admires the national Capitol, and even
sees something to praise in Trumbull's paintings.
There are frequent notes of pleasure in
speaking of the friendships that she made among
Americans. She utters no cant upon the subject
of slavery, as so many English writers of
the day saw fit to do. In fact, whatever she
writes sincere sonat; and the inherent truth of
her description is unconsciously corroborated in
the far more friendly and more philosophic narrative
of Harriet Martineau ten years later.
Such bits of exaggeration as are to be detected
are readily separable from their context, and
are purely literary in their motive; as in her
anecdote of the patriotic gentleman who took
out a graduated pencil-case in order to prove to
her by actual measurements on the map that
England was smaller than one of our least important
accept as a possible occurrence; but when she
goes on to say that having completed his demonstration,
this person triumphantly replaced
his pencil-case, and with his feet upon the chimneypiece
whistled Yankee Doodle, c'est un peu
trop fort, and we are probably justified in setting
it down as a bit of literary colour.
It is interesting to note the coincidence in
many places between Mrs. Trollope's narrative
and certain famous passages of Martin Chuzzlewit;
though, so far as the writer knows, this
coincidence has never been made the subject of
comment. One might almost fancy that Mrs.
Trollope's descriptions are the material from
which the more highly coloured pictures of Dickens
were elaborated. Thus, the gentleman of
Vernon who expressed his disgust for law may
stand as a dim archetype of the great Elijah
Pogram in his noble contempt for table manners.
The literary lady who wrote "sat-heres" irresistibly
suggests the immortal Mrs. Hominy,
the Mother of the Modern Gracchi. The sociable
milkman of Cincinnati, whose conversation
is described at some length, is a milder and
less belligerent Hannibal Chollop. Mark Tapley's
"military officers" meet us early in the
book. The poetical shoemaker in chapter ix. is
probably a first cousin to Putnam Smif; the
hotel proprietor at Memphis is doubtless Captain
Kedgick; and the Watertoast Sympathizers are
to be found as individuals scattered throughout
the book.
These are the lighter and more amusing passages
suggestiveness and power. Such, for instance,
is the account of the camp-meeting scene at
midnight, which is absolutely truthful and is
told with a realism that is almost painful. Equal
in interest are the revival scene; the description
of the religious debate between Alexander
Campbell (founder of the Campbellites) and
Robert Dale Owen; the account of the reception
of President Jackson at Cincinnati; the writer's
impressions of slavery; her picture of the city
of Washington in 1830; her view of life in a
Philadelphia boarding-house; and her survey
of contemporary American literature. All of
these chapters are written with sobriety and
good sense, enlivened by a singularly vivacious
and pungent style; and with the innumerable
anecdotes drawn from Mrs. Trollope's own experiences,
they possess no slight historical value
for the student of our social conditions in the
days when, to borrow the expression of Mr.
Henry James, American society was not only
provincial, but parochial.
| Domestic manners of the Americans | |