Failure into Fiction

Upon its publication in 1832, Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans instantaneously became one of the most popular and controversial British travel accounts of the ‘lost’ or ‘renegade’ colony in North America. Generating intense reactions on both sides of the Atlantic, the book's notoriety was to influence transatlantic relations for decades. ‘To trollopize’ became a recognized verb in the English language that meant ‘to abuse the American nation’ or, in America, ‘to be satirical about one's experiences’. ¹ No wonder that Susanna Moodie, in her autobiographical account of emigration to Canada in the 1830s, Roughing It in the Bush, recorded prejudices against British authors abroad with a characteristic ambivalence: ‘Authors and literary people they held in supreme detestation; and I was told by a lady the very first time I appeared in company, that “she heard that I wrote books, but she could tell me that they did not want a Mrs Trollope in Canada”.’ ² Moodie sympathized with Trollope without either having known her or read her work. The hostility with which the English writer was regarded was enough to secure Moodie's support:

I had not then read Mrs Trollope's work on America, or I should have comprehended at once the cause of [a neighbouring settler's] indignation; for she was just such a person as would have drawn forth the keen satire of that far-seeing observer of the absurdities of our nature, whose witty exposure of American affectation has done more towards producing a reform in that respect, than would have resulted from a thousand grave animadversions soberly written. ³