The irritable Mrs T in America

Press, 31 August 1985, Page 20

The irritable Mrs T in America

Domestic Manners of the Americans. By Fanny Trollope. Oxford

University Press, 1984. 369 pp. $12.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Glyn Strange)

In Mrs Trollope’s day the package tour did not exist (although it must have been embryonic because she observed parties of visitors to Niagara Falls who arrived in the morning, walked to the falls, returned to the hotel for lunch, and departed immediately afterwards). She was perforce what is now sometimes called an independent traveller, making her own way according to her own plans, by public transport and on a fairly limited budget. At 50 she was, perhaps, too old for the frustrations and discomforts that such travel affords as readily as it does challenges and enjoyment. Had the package tour been available, she might have enjoyed herself better, but as it was she merely produced a spiteful book. She saw many good things in America, but she prefers to complain loud and long about the many things she did not like, and the reviewer is provoked into ignoring the pleasures of her book and concentrating on its shortcomings. About half of it is devoted to a rather withering attack on the unrefined aspects of frontier society in the west. She spent two years in Cincinnati in the 1820 s and her

troublesome existence there seems to have coloured her whole view of — ,»>

America. As the “Edinburgh Review said in its review of the book at the time of its original publication in 1832, it was as if a visitor ot Britain had

based his view of the country on conditions prevailing in the Orkneys. Mrs T did not mix with what she calls the patrician class of Americans, but she still damns the nation generally as unrefined because she was unlucky enough to mix more with the lower than with the better sort. She also makes such imperious generalisations that one instinctively senses that she was wrong — that she never heard a sentence elegantly turned anywhere in America, or that white Americans were to a man unmusical, for example. If she had mixed with the lower classes of her own country she would probably have been able to say the same things of them. She shows her own “refinement” by sprinkling her book with unnecessary and affected French phrases and allusions to minor poets. She is suitably in awe of the grandeur of Niagara, but is otherwise hard to please. Usually she is overfastidious. Even the odour of rotting leaves that makes forest scenes so memorable was repugnant to her, and although she came to tolerate it, she at first violently disliked the inoffensive watermelon.

Her main failing, thougn, is that she lacks a sense of humour. She can laugh neither at the innumerable frustrations of travel in an emerging nation nor at herself. She does not find the differences between America and Britain amusing, but tends to assume that whatever is different is also therefore inferior.

There is not a stroke of humour in her book despite the many situations in which it is latent: when the spurious concept of “freedom” is held to compensate for the potholes in the roads, when the starchy old British matron is familiarly addressed as “honey” by her egalitarian neighbours, and in many more. Grim old Mrs T, mother of the novelist Anthony T, refuses to unbend and offers her readers what is little more than an exercise in sustained moaning. She wrote her book in a hurry, in a desperate attempt to rescue the family finances. She had no time to relax and present a balanced view even had she wished to, and her book, despite or perhaps because of its notorious unfairness, sold very well. It is still reprinted a century and a half later, but she is such a bad-tempered old harridan that one’s sympathies almost naturally go out to the tobaccochewing, spitting, uncultured, and arrogant Americans who are her victims.