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Frances Trollope Biography

As “detestable” as she found the church revival, Trollope was to witness a much larger camp meeting in the woods that she thought was even worse. Instead of a score of hysterical females finding Jesus and shouting “Glory!” there were hundreds of them, “uttering howlings and groans, so terrible that I shall never cease to shudder when I recall them.” She pointed out that, “Many of these wretched creatures were beautiful young females” whom the preachers moved among, “at once exciting and soothing their agonies,” and, “with insidious lips,” breathing into their ears “consolations that tinged the pale cheeks with red.” Exhorted by the preacher to come forward and be saved, they fell on their knees and became convulsive and were soon all “lying on the ground in an indescribable confusion of heads and legs. . . . But how am I to describe the sounds that proceeded from this strange mass of human beings? I know no words which can convey an idea of it. Hysterical sobbing, convulsive groans, shrieks and screams the most appalling burst forth on all sides. I felt sick with horror.” For her, this was not the American dream; it was the American nightmare. Was the United States a product of the Age of Reason or the Age of Superstition?

The morning after the camp meeting, at breakfast, “I marked,” she wrote, “many a fair but pale face, that I recognised as a demoniac of the night, simpering beside a swain, to whom she carefully administered hot coffee and eggs. The preaching saint [the preachers] and the howling sinner [the young females] seemed alike to relish this mode of recruiting their strength.” The camp meeting Trollope described is like the gathering of the ungodly in the woods outside Salem in Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown.” The morning after participating in the witches gathering, the remorseful young Goodman Brown is surprised to see those he had seen (or dreamed he had seen) behaving like devils the night before, going about their business in the village as if they were innocent as lambs. The no-longer-young Goodman Brown went to his grave a complete Calvinist, convinced of the innate depravity of everybody, trusting nobody.

Having witnessed Americans not only at their most unmannerly but at their most chastely Lady Chatterly, Mrs. Trollope did not despair. She did not improve her family’s finances in America, but she did when she returned to England and wrote Domestic Manners of the Americans. Catering to the prejudices of the English, and exaggerating the boorish manners and the religious fanaticism of Americans, Domestic Manners became a best-seller. It was her first book, but far from her last. She went on to publish over a hundred books, both non-fiction and fiction, including an anti-slavery novel that may have influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Two of her sons, Thomas and Anthony Trollope, went on to become successful writers. Anthony became one of England’s most popular novelists, and millions of Americans have watched dramatizations of his novels on PBS television.

Whatever her faults and however much Americans might rightfully feel she did them dirt, Mrs. Trollope was a resourceful woman who overcame all kinds of obstacles. As a baronet, her husband had been born with many advantages, but everything he touched turn to failure and he squandered his inheritance on ill-advised attempts at farming after he had failed as a lawyer. "His life as I knew it," his son Anthony wrote, "was one long tragedy." Mrs. Trollope didn’t let her husband’s problems stop her. When he had to flee England to escape debtor’s prison, she and her children accompanied him to Belgium, where she supported the whole family through her writing while nursing her ill husband and the two of her children who had tuberculosis. (Four of her six children would eventually die of the disease.) She was both nurse and writer. "The doctor's vials and the ink-pot held equal places in my mother's rooms," her son Anthony wrote. in his autobiography. She proved so successful as an author that, following her husband’s death, she was able to spend the last twenty years of her life in sunny Italy, far from gloomy Great Britain and even father from Cincinnati. "She continued writing up until 1856, when she was seventy-six years old," Anthony wrote, "and had at that time produced 114 volumes, of which the first was not produced until she was fifty."

What is American (Frances Trollope 1780 – 1863)
Frances Trollope is a novelist and miscellaneous writer. She was born at Stapleton near Bristol. She married in 1809 Thomas, a querulous lawyer, who fell into financial misfortune. She then in 1827 went with her family to Cincinnati, where the efforts which she made to survive were unsuccessful for two years. Her one hope was to make a book out of her experiences. On her return to England, however, she brought herself into notice by publishing Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), in which she gave a very unfavorable and grossly exaggerated account of the subject. The mocking by contemporary European travelers about American proud and vulgarity, such as Trollope's notorious critique of the Domestic Manners of the Americans, hurt domestic readers because, however overdrawn, they could not be easily dismissed. Many foreign visitors believed, Trollope among them, that American egalitarianism simply fomented a culture of crude familiarity and rudeness, particularly at the dining table.
Domestics Manner of the Americans tells us about how actually the manner of American people. They should behave politely in daily activities. Especially in dining table. They should not behave in such manner. Respecting the dinner, the people and also the menu would pleased them and more comfort in spending the dinner time. They spend their menu by using the blade of knife until the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth. Seeing the idea that is written in Domestics Manner of the Americans actually it is not only criticize the dinning table but also the manner of Americans people in daily life. As she said at the Domestics Manner of the Americans “ I don’t like them. I do not like their principle, I do not like their manner, I do not like their opinion”. She announced that The American exhibited a total want of manners, both in males and females. They were inquisitive, boring, uncultivated, uncouth, humorless and self- satisfied. The American behavior in How they treat others people is still questioning. Some of them do not give the totally rights as human being. They still differentiate between man and women even white and black and also the rights of slave and Indian. Therefore it is a great way to steal the attention of Americans people to start thinking about their manner to be good manner.
Besides Domestics Manner of the Americans , she also write a novel, The Refugee in America (1832), pursued it on similar lines. Next came the three novels The Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or Scene on the Mississippi (1836), The Barnabus in America (1843), and The Old world and The New: a Novel (1849). Thereafter she continued to pour forth novels and books on miscellaneous subjects, writing in all over 100 volumes. Though possessed of considerable powers of observation and a sharp and caustic wit, such an output was fatal to permanent literary success, and none of her books are now read. She spent the last 20 years of her life at Florence, then she died in 1863.