Book of a lifetime: Domestic Manners of the Americans by Fanny Trollope

From The Independent archive: Sara Wheeler on a Bristolian’s view of the fabled New World republic

Frances Milton Trollope was a fine and intuitive writer – stylish, pithy, elegant, waspish (Getty/iStock)

Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) is a traveller’s account of the newborn republic between the war of independence and the civil war. An enchanting blend of topographical description, social commentary and robust rebuke, the book fizzes with the energy, fun and righteous indignation of a dumpy, middle-aged Bristolian called Fanny Trollope. What an inspiration is Fanny! She has the essential reporter’s curiosity, insisting on being lowered into Ohioan coal mines or hoisted onto Pennsylvanian factory platforms.

A radical by temperament rather than ideology, she is determined to uncover the truth about the fabled American democracy. Voyaging through the slave state of Kentucky, Fanny notes with unease that all men are not as equal as had first appeared. “You will see them with one hand,” she later writes of her Cincinnati neighbours, “hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves.” Above all she despised “the total and universal want of manners”, the manifestation of which ranged from eating foot-long slices of watermelon in public to tossing pigs’ tails into flowerbeds and vomiting in the theatre pit.