Domestic Manners of the Americans

Frances Trollope, known throughout her life as Fanny, was born Frances Milton in 1779 in Bristol, England. The daughter of a clergyman, she developed a taste for literature and languages while a child. When a young adult, she moved to London to be with her brother, who had been employed in the War Office. In 1809, Trollope married Thomas Anthony Trollope, a barrister in London. The couple had seven children, one of whom was the novelist Anthony Trollope (1815–1882).

Due to Thomas’s largely unsuccessful business ventures and poor health, Fanny at the age of 48 decided to travel to America in an attempt to improve the family finances in the New World. For about three years she traveled throughout the United States, from New Orleans to Cincinnati to the East Coast.

Back in England in 1830, Trollope turned to writing to support her family. She worked her travel notes into Domestic Manners of the Americans and went on to write five more travel books and 35 novels. Her travels on the European continent led her to meet such notables as King Louis Philippe, Metternich, and Chateaubriand. Meanwhile, Domestic Manners became a lightning rod in America, making Trollope the center of much heated discussion.

For the last 20 years of her life, Trollope lived with her oldest son Tom, also a writer, at his villa in Florence, where she met with other British authors of the rising generation like Dickens and the Brownings. Trollope died in 1863 at age 84.

Although today less famous than her son Anthony, Fanny Trollope’s own body of work also addresses social and gender issues in a timely way. Trollope’s novels, including The Vicar of Wrexhill and Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, took on social and religious questions such as the Industrial Revolution and the rise of evangelicalism, sometimes with a satirical intent. Her anti-slavery novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitelaw is considered to have influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Coming at a time of keen interest in the American experiment on the other side of the Atlantic, Domestic Manners was credited with casting skepticism on the American way of life among the British and awakening a self-critical awareness among American thinkers.