49 pages • 1 hour read
Frances TrollopeDomestic Manners of the Americans
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1832A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Literary Context: Travel Books on America by 19th-Century Europeans
Domestic Manners is only one of many 19th-century travelogs about America by European writers. After the founding of the American republic, curiosity about the “American experiment” spread, and many European thinkers were eager to observe the new republic. The impetus for Trollope’s book came from two works by her friends and colleagues: Fanny Wright’s Views of Society and Manners in America (1821) and Basil Hall’s Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828 (1829).
Wright’s book (like Trollope’s) concentrated on everyday life and customs in America, but it was largely laudatory. Hall, a captain in the British navy, went to the US with his wife to observe American society, and his observations as reported in his book were far more negative, causing Hall to be attacked in the American press. Trollope in her book follows Hall’s critical stance, even taking up an entire chapter (31) to defend Hall and his book.
By far the best known of the travelogs is Democracy in America by the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, published in 1840. Tocqueville goes beyond domestic concerns to focus on the political structure of the United States and, in particular, how democracy creates a distinctive cultural and social atmosphere in the country. Far more favorable toward America than either Hall or Trollope, Tocqueville finds positive lessons in America for Europeans to draw from.
During the same era, another celebrated French author, René de Chateaubriand (Tocqueville’s uncle), produced his own memoirs of his travels in America, Travels in America and Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. While Tocqueville’s approach was realistic, Chateaubriand’s was Romantic, combining real events during the author’s five months in America with imagined or fictionalized incidents.
Domestic Manners inspired a further work in its turn: American Notes (1842) by Charles Dickens. Dickens, an admirer of Trollope’s book, went to America in part hoping to disprove her negative impressions. However, like Trollope, he found his idealistic hopes about America dashed by the “vulgarity and meanness” (Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopedia. "American Notes." Encyclopedia Britannica, 25 Nov. 2014.) he found there, and in the end, he agreed with Trollope’s assessments. Like Trollope, Dickens saw the institution of slavery as unworthy of American ideals and attacked it in his book, contributing to the growing conversation about the morality of slavery in the lead-up to the American Civil War.
Cultural Context: The Second Great Awakening
Domestic Manners is written against the backdrop of the Second Great Awakening, an important religious and spiritual movement in the United States. The original Great Awakening, which took place between the 1720s and 1740s, saw the growth of religious feeling and activity among Protestant communities in America after a period of secularism. Preachers (such as George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards) emphasized the need to repent from worldly and sinful lives and to be “reborn” in Jesus.
The Great Awakening was essentially Calvinist and primarily affected various Protestant denominations in New England. The emotional and democratic aspects of the Awakening are also considered to have fueled the fervor that led to the American Revolution.
The Second Great Awakening (1795–1835) further intensified the movement, starting in New England and spreading westward and southward. Two institutions became key to the movement’s spread: the religious “revival” and the camp meeting. Revivals were so popular that churches could no longer contain the throngs of followers, so the meetings moved out to open fields and tents. Evangelical forms of worship came into being, emphasizing conversion, personal religious experience, spiritual “rebirth,” highly dramatic preaching about sin and its consequences, and spiritual “healings.” Trollope witnesses all of these practices during a camp meeting outside of Cincinnati in Chapter 15.
A mainstream Anglican, Trollope disapproves of the emotional extravagance of evangelical revivalism. She considers the movement to be particularly harmful to women and depicts revivalist ministers as preying sexually upon young female “converts.”
However, historians also emphasize the movement’s progressive features: It resulted in the establishment of universities and far-reaching social reforms, including the temperance movement and the emancipation of women. The Second Great Awakening is generally considered to have been less emotional than the Great Awakening, and while originating in America it soon spread to Britain and other countries from the 1830s onward—a fact which Trollope regretfully acknowledges in a footnote to the book’s 1839 edition.
Because not all believers accepted revivalism, the movement caused American denominations to splinter, leading to greater religious diversity—another feature of American religious life that Trollope criticizes, arguing instead for a state church to provide a central focus and example to a country’s religious life.
