"I have never seen the bay of Naples, I can therefore make no comparison, but my imagination is incapable of conceiving any thing of the kind more beautiful than the harbour of New York. New york, indeed, appeared to us, even when we saw it by soberer light, a lovely and noble city. situated on an island, which I think it will one day cover, it rises like Venice from the sea and like that fairest of the cities, receives into its lap tributes of all the riches of the world."
Thus writes Frances Trollope in her 1832. travelogue, notorious for its alleged criticism of all things American. It was a sensation of literary world on both sides of Atlantic for completely opposite reasons - Englishmen read it with a glee, Americans were insulted and infuriated. Not that she was the first in this - world traveller Basil Hall had already ruffled some feathers with his "Travels in North America" but this little gentlewoman cut even deeper in her clear-eyed descriptions of what she had found during her three years there. I have purposely quoted her first impression of New York to point to the facts - to all who actually bother to read the book - that Mrs.Trollope had not arrived full of malice and venom but her impressions were mixture of delight and disappointment, and the undisputed truth that she could write very well.
I had good luck to find 1960. print with excellent, lengthy introduction of professor Donald Smalley who explains in detail circumstances and background behind this book, how & why Mrs.Trollope came in North America and how she unsuccessfully tried a new start in life there, the travelogue being just a side note and hobby during the times when of all her assembled family she was the only one who actually pushed forward constantly. There was just so much she could do as a woman with limited finances and husband being more or less absent. It is a paradox that all her business dreams in North America came to nothing, but the travelogue was the true start of her life and career.
Was she really so nasty and offensive? Not at all - Mrs.Trollope was a visitor from another society and she would probably have written similar descriptions had she been placed in Tibet, Sahara or Antarctic. She records with the greatest enthusiasm plants, flowers, fruits and nature around her - being true Englishwoman she loved roaming in the wilderness and took long walks constantly (to amazement of her hosts who find it odd for a woman). She scrutinized architecture of these new, young cities and complimented when inspired. But she also noted pigs roaming the streets, people spitting and chewing Tobacco, women being locked away and the question of slavery - coming from class-conscious old world, she was annoyed with informality that surrounded her and what she perceived as lack of refinement (pointing simultaneously to the fact she was not really predisposed for a business success). I honestly think she was a sweetheart who wrote these notes out from occasional frustration (probably inspired by above mentioned Basil Hall) and as for the facts that so irritated Americans, here is what many years later Mark Twain wrote: " Of all these tourists, I like Dame Trollope the best. Yet she was merely telling the truth and this indignant nation knew it. She was painting the state of things which did not disappear at once. It lasted well enough in my youth and I remember it. She found a "civilization" here which you, reader, could not have endured and which you would not have regarded as civilization at all. She did not gild us and neither did she whitewashed us."
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