1827 Frances Trollope arrived in the United States on this day, not through the usual portals of Boston, New York or Philadelphia but via the Mississippi Delta. She could tell they were approaching their landfall, as she was later to write in Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), when ‘the deep blue of the Mexican Gulf’ began to be sullied by the Mississippi’s ‘muddy mass of waters’.
As they made their way upstream, she ‘never beheld a scene so utterly desolate’, relieved only by huge crocodiles ‘luxuriating in the slime’ and a tree that had been dislodged by a hurricane, ‘with its roots mocking the heavens while the dishonoured branches lash[ed] the tide in idle vengeance’, like ‘the fragment of a world in ruins’. In short, it was the world turned upside down, as the old radical anthem had it, nature’s emblem for the ‘I’m-as-good-as-you’ politics of the young republic.
But this was written after her disappointing return from her American venture. The New World hadn’t always presented such a vision of chaos. It was to be the way of mending the family’s hopes and fortunes after her husband failed at the bar because of his bad temper. Taking her three youngest children (Anthony, now at school, stayed behind with his father), she made her way to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she decided to open an ‘emporium’ offering the latest European fashions.
Twenty years on, after canal and railroad connections had brought increasing trade, the investment might have paid off. As it was, the settlement was only eleven years old as a ‘city’ when the Trollopes moved in, and the residents were mostly preoccupied with more practical matters. Disappointed and more or less destitute, Mrs Trollope had one last card to play.
Returning home by way of the more established cities of the east coast, she turned herself into a tourist, just as other disappointed and failed English emigrants had before her – William Clark, Richard Weston, Francis Wyse, and many others – their sights fixed on the avid home market for books that satirised or otherwise deprecated the upstart offspring that had dared to break away from its maternal roots. Titles like Clark’s The Mania of Emigrating to the United States (1820) set both scene and tone. Domestic Manners of the Americans was Frances Trollope’s own variant of the sub-genre. It sold like hot cakes.