Domestic Manners of the Americans

Philadelphia was esteemed by 19th-century Americans as the “cradle of American liberty.” The “city of brotherly love” was praised for aesthetic beauty, well-organized layout, and its long history of tolerance and peace under the Quaker influence of its founder, William Penn. Trollope, however, finds the city overrated on the whole, especially for the monotonous regularity of its layout. This shows once again Trollope’s contrarian attitude toward things admired by Americans.

Trollope does, however, find a number of things she likes about “Philadelphian manners,” much of it owing to the genteel ways of the Quakers themselves. She notes Philadelphians’ lack of pretension, quietness, and good taste, which resonate with her own English sensibility.

Yet in other respects, Philadelphia repeats the defects Trollope finds elsewhere in America. The city is characterized by a Puritan severity in its customs—she finds the absence of nightlife barbarous—and the clergy has the same negative influence on women here as in other regions. In Chapter 25, Trollope uses her encounter with a German immigrant woman in one of Philadelphia’s parks to bolster her negative judgments on Americans, since the woman shares many of her views.

Illustrating her free-form style of commentary, in Chapter 26 Trollope spins her travelog descriptions into an extensive digression about The Status of Women as Setting the Tone for Society. She starts by discussing the place of literature in America. Although literature is not widely prized, wherever it is it has a “purifying” and “enlarging” effect. It refines the manners of men, but Trollope sees it as especially important that literature be put in the hands of women to aid in their education and enlightenment—which she characterizes as “the tone of their drawing-rooms” (221).

Trollope contrasts this vision with the reality for women in America, giving an elaborate and satirical description of their typical day (217–19). In Trollope’s account, Americans are married very young and then live a limited and uneventful life restricted to the home and a few social and charitable clubs, with a lack of meaningful attention or emotional empathy from their husbands. Trollope hopes her comments will spark social reform: “Should the women of America ever discover what their power might be, and compare it with what it is, much improvement might be hoped for” (217).

Concluding Chapter 26, Trollope again provides social commentary by remarking on the execution by hanging of a criminal, an Irish immigrant, in Philadelphia. She concludes that the rarity of capital punishment in the US is not due to the absence of crime but to the fact that criminals frequently evade the law. Further, the fact that more Irish immigrants than native-born Americans have been executed suggests inequity, a theme that Trollope lightly hints at without developing further.

In both these instances, Trollope uses the book as a vehicle for social change, showing that she would be happy to see America improve according to her principles.