Fanny went on to write more than forty books, most of them novels-her son Anthony, author of Barchester Towers, no doubt used her as a model for industry-but no subsequent book of hers was ever quite as successful as “Domestic Manners.”

Americans hated the book, but the English loved it a great success, it endowed the Trollope family with a new fortune. She found many vistas and prospects to admire-the grand expanse of Washington, the pastoral beauties of Virginia, the imposing grandeur of Niagara-and more aspects of the American character to deplore. Undaunted, Fanny, having borrowed money from friends, left Cincinnati for a tour of the eastern United Sates, determined to make her fortune by writing an account of her American travels. Trollope sent from England were seized for debt, and the Trollope family was bankrupt. Alas, the conception was too ambitious, the building itself too extensive the goods Mr. Trollope invested her profits in the “Trollope Bazaar,” a proposed cultural center where she planned to feature concerts, exhibits of art, lectures, and a market for luxury goods. to sponsor what she called “The Infernal Regions”-located heterodoxically in an upper story of the museum-an exhibit populated by a waxwork Lucifer (with rolling eyeballs), waxwork demons, real honest-to-god skeletons of executed criminals, and featuring-courtesy of a local special-effects man named Powers-a fountain of flame, a frozen lake surrounded by columns of ice, and an electrified grate which not only served to block off entrance to the exhibit but also gave the too eager observer a little shock from hell.Įncouraged by success, Mrs. One month after this addition, Fanny Trollope arrived. To save his beloved museum, he lowered his cultural standards and decided to add a waxworks display. She joined forces with Joseph Dorfeuille, the curator of a private natural history museum, who for the last three years had sought, with little success, to appeal to Cincinnati's best society.

She quickly abandoned hopes for an interracial utopia in the Tennessee forest-the first sight of the Nashoba Community filled her with “desolation”-and soon traveled up the Ohio to seek her fortune in Cincinnati.Īlthough she did not admire the “Queen City of the West”-an “uninteresting mass of buildings” with poor drainage-she soon devised a stratagem for supporting her family there. In 1827, her husband's law practice having failed, Frances Trollope set sail for the mouth of the Mississippi with three of her six children, hoping to relieve the pressure of family debt either by communal refuge or commercial enterprise. This travel book, by a sharp-eyed Englishwoman who wrote almost two centuries ago, not only shows us a young America which has changed greatly, but also reveals an archetypal American citizen who has changed much less than the country itself.

Frances trollope domestic manners