Domestic Manners of the Americans is a two-volume travel book by Frances Milton Trollope, published in 1832, which follows her travels through America and her residence in Cincinnati, at the time still a frontier town. Context Frances Trollope travelled to the U.S. with her son Henry, "having been partly instigated by the social and communistic ideas of a lady whom I well remember, a certain Miss Wright, who was, I think, the first of the American female lecturers" (Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography). She briefly stayed at the Nashoba Commune, a utopian settlement for ex-slaves set up by Frances Wright in Tennessee, but was dismayed by the primitive conditions. It had been only 15 years since the United Kingdom was at war with the United States and the earlier American Revolutionary War was still remembered. Trollope's own views on government contrasted with American-style republicanism. According to Katherine Moore, while in America, Trollope was unhappy as a result of financial and marital difficulties. Trollope's analysis of the USA The book created a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, as Frances Trollope had a caustic view of the Americans and found America strongly lacking in manners and learning. She was appalled by America's egalitarian middle-class and by the influence of evangelicalism that was emerging during the Second Great Awakening. Trollope was also harshly critical of slavery of African Americans in the United States, and by the popularity of tobacco chewing, and the consequent spitting, even on carpets. After seeing much of what the United States had to offer, her overall impression was not favourable. At the end of the book, she tried to summarise what she found wrong in the American character: Reactions The book was both highly controversial and highly successful, selling "like wildfire". It also enabled its author to become a wage-earner and save her family from penury. American author Mark Twain was amused and impressed by Trollope's observations of the Antebellum frontier America he grew up in: "Mrs Trollope was so handsomely cursed and reviled by this nation [for] telling the truth...she was painting a state of things which did not change at once...I remember it." Benjamin Perley Poore noted the energy with which her book reviled the frontier habit of expectoration. "So often did Mrs. Trollope recur to this habit," Poore wrote, "that she managed to give one the impression that this country was in those days a