Episodes |
1) In the London Quarterly Review for January 1814 appeared a long and brilliantly written review of an anonymous American pamphlet entitled Inchiquin the Jesuit's Letters, which had been published in New York some four years earlier. The pamphlet, indeed, was only of passing interest to the Quarterly. The real issue was the moral condition of the United States, an enemy which had to be dealt with during the coming year first militarily then diplomatically. The British reader was to be assured that the Americans should be handled no less severely than the French. To this end, the essayist revealed the distressing truth: through Gallic influence the Yankees had become imperialists, and the mania pervaded every aspect of life in the States. It followed that such a people should be chastised without scruple -- whatever their English affinities. American magazines called the review a "collected mass of calumny and falsehood against a whole nation," a "nefarious tissue of calumnies on the American character," a copy of "all the effusions of malevolence, misrepresentation, and ignorance" which the Quarterly could find against "American taste, customs, morality, and literature."
Herbert G. Eldridge 49
2) The American relationship with Great Britain nonetheless played a crucial role in the process of national self-definition.
Sam W. Haynes 1
3) For although liberty was the watchword in Britain and America during the early nineteenth century, slavery was the rule, not the exception, on the ground.
Matthew Mason 696
4) Her [Frances Trollope] great hopes and their almost immediate collapse explain in a large part her late bitterness about America and the Americans.
Helen Heineman, "Starving" 649
5) By the early 1840s, an entire generation of Americans had been raised to maturity with the animadversions of foreign critics ringing in its ears. But if they had long since wearied of British censure, they did not yearn any less for British praise. Patiently, pathetically, they waited for benediction. And so when it was announced that none other than Charles Dickens would be crossing the Atlantic to see the brash young republic, the accumulated resentment of decades was promptly forgotten. The United States had hosted distinguished literary types before, but Basil Hall and Frederick Marryat could hardly claim such Parnassian heights of celebrity. Dickens was, after all, the most beloved writer in the Anglophone world, and one of the first novelists in any language whose readership extended beyond the beau monde.
Sam W. Haynes 45
6) Although most British visitors, even during this period of better rivalry, were friendly to America's republican institutions, some used slavery to join the barrage against the Jacobins of the Western Hemisphere. The author of one postwar narrative, English farmer William Faux, found that his travels confirmed his prejudice against American republicanism. Though ambivalent about slavery in the abstract, Faux never tired of relating incidents of cruelty and avaricious speculation among American slaveholders. "There is, indeed, something in a real upright and downright honest John Bull," he reflected in a letter to an English friend, "that cannot be found in the sly, say-nothing, smiling, deep speculating money-hunting Jonathans of this all-men-are-born-equally-free-and-independent, negro driving, wow-skin republic." From Americans' democratic individualism and greed, "man-stealing . . . slavery, whips, gags, chains, and all the black catalogue of monstrous ills proceed." He far preferred the orderly society of Britain, where "the poor negro's chains" fell off under a regime that knew what liberty meant and how to preserve it.
Matthew Mason 679
7) Mrs. Frances Trollope did not like the Americans. After three and a half years in their society she returned home to England and said so in her celebrated book. Published in March 1832, Domestic Manners of the Americans ran through four English and four American editions before the year's end. The hitherto unknown Fanny Trollope became a celebrity overnight.
Tim Worth 17
8) "That nation hates us," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1786, after visiting England, and if this was not damning enough, he added, "their ministers hate us, and their king more than all other men." Jefferson's observation was not an isolated one. After the Revolution Americans were repeatedly shocked and dismayed that the English could not harbor a more generous attitude towards the new United States. They believed English travellers in America wrote insensitive and myopic records for an ignorant market; the British government endorsed those views and resented or ignored the progress and refinement of American nationhood, and the powerful British periodicals fuelled a campaign against a young American culture. This apparent antagonism wounded Americans who were in the process of adjusting to their new nationality and for whom a fading Englishness flavoured and idealized perception of the Anglo-American relationship. Some were prepared to hit back, figuratively at least, in what became known as the Paper War.
Jennifer Clark 45
9) To their dismay, Americans found that they had failed to meet Dickens' great expectations. The author had clearly hoped to find, in a society in which the extremes of rich and poor were less marked than in his own country, a greater degree of solicitude toward the underprivileged. Instead, he found a distressing callousness; the famous American "go-ahead" spirit seemed to have no regard for those left behind. During a stay in New York, he had ventured off the beaten path, probing Gotham's seamy underbelly with two members of the constabulary as his guides. The author had been shocked by the slums of the Five Points, and particularly by the squalid conditions endured by the city's free black community. In Philadelphia, a visit to the East Pennsylvania Penitentiary, a much-ballyhooed model of penal reform, filled the English author with disgust, its strict rules of solitary confinement he likened to being "buried alive."
Sam W. Haynes 47
10) The Scottish radical Frances Wright also concluded that American slavery must be abolished because of its effects on republicanism's reputation. She argued that the American government had done all it could to efface chattel bondage from North America. Yet it was not enough: "Should the masters content themselves with idly deploring the evil," she recognized, "instead of ‘setting their shoulder to the wheel' and actively working out its remedy," none of their many virtues would "preserve the southern planters form the reprobation of their northern brethren, and the scorn of mankind." She closed with a passionate appeal for emancipation that explicitly linked it to the reputation of free government worldwide. "An awful responsibility," she declared, "has devolved on the American nation; the liberties of mankind are entrusted to their guardianship; the honor of freedom is identified with the honor of their republic." Wright earnestly hoped that the day would soon arrive "when a slave will not be found in America!"
Matthew Mason 681
11) Trollope's book, because of its great notoriety, became a best seller in Britain and in America.
Sidney P. Moss and Carolyn Moss 260
12) For all its many contradictions, the American relationship with Great Britain nonetheless played a crucial role in the process of national self-definition. It could hardly be otherwise. With John Bull intruding upon virtually every aspect of public life, from politics to economic development to literature to the performing arts, Brother Jonathan was constantly reminded of his subordinate status in the transatlantic equation. Unabashed Anglophiles, of course, were untroubled by the disparity. But a majority of Americans were at least willing to pay lip service to the goal of divesting the republic of its Old World influences. As earnest republicans, they instinctively sought to sever the ties that still connected the two nations, as if in so doing they could prove themselves worthy of the legacy bequeathed to them by the Revolutionary generation. Wrestling with feelings of inferiority, they endeavored to fashion -- "albeit fitfully, and with varying degrees of commitment and success -- "a sense of Americanness in contradistinction to British norms.
Sam W. Haynes 1
13) Again and again she [France Trollope] fails to see any hopeful potentiality in the idea of equality as it was manifested in 19th century western America.
Helen Heineman, "Domestic" 557
14) More than national character and consistency were involved when slavery entered Anglo-American politics and diplomacy. Slavery shaped the mighty contest between monarchy (and its variants such as oligarchy) and republicanism. After the War of 1812, which coincided with Britain's vanquishing its Continental rival France as well as with severe challenges to Britain's oligarchy at home, American slavery featured more prominently than ever in transatlantic politics. During the war years, slavery served as a potent weapon in the hands of men and women on both sides of the Atlantic as they expressed antipathy to one or the other form of government and society. When slavery entered such debates, it assumed even greater proportions. Defenders of both forms of government were quick to detect despotism or Jacobinism, respectively, lurking behind their foes' observations on slavery.
Matthew Mason 677-78
15) The most ardent English critics were travellers to America -- men such as Thomas Ashe, Richard "Farmer" Parkinson, Henry B. Fearon, Isaac Weld, Captain Basil Hall and Edward Kendall. Nothing seemed to please them. They were constantly disappointed and felt obliged to say so. In particular, the character of the American people and their institutions drew ridicule and censure. Fearon, for example, criticized subjects so diverse as the lack of a credible native literature: the vanity of the Americans, which he argued was even worse than that of the French; the likely demise of the constitution; overcrowding in boarding houses and the propensity of Americans to spit, smoke "segars" and act in an indolent fashion.
Jennifer Clark 47
16) Thus, the Inchiquin affair helped establish the distinctive ebb and flow that marked Anglo-American paper warfare in the first half of the nineteenth century. British voices provoked the flare ups of 1806 and 1815, both of which subsided rapidly because American resentment was tempered by a set of stubborn predilections: Federalism, love of English letters, admiration of the great journals of London and Edinburgh, and the certainty, let it be said, that the people of Great Britain shared feelings of kinship. But the Inchiquin attack helped bring about lasting changes in attitude. No longer would American editors trust the confraternity of letters to restrain the violence of politics -- having seen that British critical journals would in the end serve British political interest. When Americans who took their opinions and tastes from the English reviews perceived that propagandists like Croker and Gifford were calling the tune, they were compelled to see literary authority at home. The Quarterly's review of Inchiquin helped force the logic of cultural self-determination.
Herbert G. Eldridge 67-68
17) The unanimity with which Americans responded to British criticism enabled them to forge a loose consensus even in the face of significant regional differences.
Sam W. Haynes 41
18) During the war years, slavery served as a potent weapon in the hands of men and women on both sides of the Atlantic as they expressed antipathy to one or the other form of government and society.
Matthew Mason 678
19) The Jefferson miscegenation story is a good example of modern legend.
Sydney and Carolyn Moss 274
20) Haynes explains how the formation of America as its own unique country cannot be separated from its relations with Britain during and after the Revolution: "the American relationship with Great Britain helps to remind us that the process by which nation states in the early stages of development arrive at coherent self-image rarely occurs in isolation" (2). Although territorially free from Britain, America was still deeply concerned about their opinion of the new Republic and took their insults very sensitively as they were having a hard time finding their own identity. The initial years of the new country saw amicable relations with Great Britain, but these kind relations quickly turned sour in the 1820s coinciding with a proliferation of negative and condescending written accounts of America by British authors -- "travel books" (28). Anti-British sentiment, stemming from travel books, and expanding way beyond, began to unite a country with geographic and ideological differences. Americans began forming a national identity because regions were able to set aside confrontational ideologies, such as slavery, and defend the nation as whole.
Sam W. Haynes 8
21) In a travel narrative that professes to be an account of the daily life of a people and a nation, the "routine" becomes the subject and content, but the narrative must make of it something exotic or amusing, astonishing or shocking, whereas in its own reality, its own environment, it is none of these things.
Tim Worth 20
22) The legendary nature of the story becomes plain enough when we see it transmitted by the British, let alone the American, press in all its grotesque accretions. For authors who purveyed the legend had access to nothing but scandal-mongering derived from a few simple facts; mainly, that a slave woman named Sally Hemings served as a domestic at Monticello and that she had children by a white man or men. To infer from these facts that Sally was Jefferson's mistress and that her children were his is the kind of non sequitur that asks us to play Othello to an Iago who proves adultery by means of a handkerchief. Nevertheless, the legend became a useful device by which British Tories, like Thomas Hamilton or Hugo Playfair, could expose republican principles as vicious in practice. The legend was also useful to British Liberals like Dickens or the younger Mrs. Trollope when, for one reason or another, they felt abused by Americans and wanted to retaliate upon them. Even without the Sally Hemings story, Jefferson was an obvious target, for, much as he professed to hate slavery, he nevertheless kept blacks enslaved -- "and that at a time when he announced to the world that all men are created equal and that liberty is among their inalienable rights. The Sally Hemings story only added titillation to the fact that the champion of democracy was a slaveholder, a titillation that so many can deplore, yet so few can resist.
Sidney P. Moss and Carolyn Moss 274
23) It is important to note that the idea of writing a book to earn money probably came in earnest only after she [Frances Trollope] had already made notes and journal entries for 25 months.
Helen Heineman, "Starving" 657
24) During the early decades of the nineteenth century, American attitudes toward Great Britain were both conflicted and complex. Some Americans continued to look to Great Britain for standards of taste and refinement, for direction in the realm of arts and letters, and for moral guidance on the issue of slavery. At the same time, a great many Americans maintained that the world's dominant empire still posed the most serious threat to the republic's security and well-being.
Sam W. Haynes 1
25) Slavery thoroughly disillusioned a few reformers with freedom as practiced in the United States. Henry Fearon publicly and lavishly toasted America and its free institutions on his arrival in New York City. Yet as he traveled more extensively, Fearon came to see the United States as a place of horrendous brutality and shameful hypocrisy. He lamented that those who mercilessly flogged and sold salves "dare to call themselves democrats, and friend of liberty! -- from such democrats, and from such friends of liberty, good Lord deliver us! On his departure from America, he declared that, although his love for freedom had not dimmed, "I certainly have experienced a most sensible diminution in my love for the possessors of freedom" on accountant of their practice of slaveholding.
Matthew Mason 679-80
26) The literary and political discourse of the Paper War shows both the American and the English struggling with the new realities made inevitable by American independence including cultural and economic divergence as well as respective domestic political demands. To English critics, the United States was a foreign nation, while to Americans, England remained the misguided parental figure of the Revolution continuing to misjudge and mistreat her offspring.
Jennifer Clark 46
27) No other people in the western hemisphere who had broken free of European colonialism celebrated their independence with such flamboyant enthusiasm. Yet none remained so connected to the imperial parent. John Bull still loomed large in the public consciousness, bound to his former colonies by ties of kinship, culture, and commerce. As a result, Americans remained inordinately sensitive to the opinion of Great Britain, "the only country," wrote one editorialist, "for whose respect we really care a straw."
Sam W. Haynes 5
28) If some British reformers sought to palliate American slavery, others concluded that the cause of liberty would forever suffer until the sole remaining republic abolished such a foul blot from its landscape. British traveler and emigrant Morris Birkbeck, for example, unabashedly proclaimed: "I love this government" of America. He talked of his "pilgrimage" to the promised land and even downplayed the severity of the Midwest's winters. But he could not bring himself to excuse American slavery. He insisted that on his pilgrimage to America he had "experienced no diminution of my love for freedom; but I hate tyranny more cordially, and I want language to express the loathing I feel for personal slavery: practiced by freemen it is most detestable." On settling in Illinois, Birkbeck was a stalwart foe of the spread of slavery to the Northwest.
Matthew Mason 681
29) British travelers to America published no more on Jefferson's reputed liaison with a slave woman until 1832 when Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans appeared, a book that out-Callendered Callender in fixing the Jefferson miscegenation legend once and for all in the collective consciousness. Indeed, for elaborating the legend to the point of grotesquerie, there is nothing to match it.
Sidney P. Moss and Carolyn Moss 259
30) Here is the essence of the Paper War. Britain and America were engaged in self-defence and the self-definition associated with nationalism respectively but each operated from quite distinct and opposing positions. Americans demanded their independence be respected and their achievements admired but they resented and did not understand the political and commercial repercussions of imperial reorganization after the defeat of Britain in the War for Independence, especially after the French Revolution and the consequences of the War of 1812. Nor did Americans truly appreciate the volatile English domestic climate. Anything but the full embrace of America was believed to indicate English jealousy.
Jennifer Clark 63-64
31) The giddiness with which Americans prepared to embrace Dickens was due only in part to his popularity as a novelist. In Dickens Americans believed they had at last found a kindred spirit among the mob of hostile critics, an author who was uniquely suited to appreciate the virtues of their republic. Unlike so many foreign travelers whose aristocratic mien prejudiced them against the leveling spirit of American society, Dickens had grown up under humble circumstances (his father, a government clerk, had been imprisoned for debt). By the early 1840s, with working-class discontent and calls for parliamentary reform on the rise, Britain seemed to hover on the brink of civil rebellion. Dickens was no Chartist; he declined to side openly with those who were demanding universal male suffrage and representative electoral districts. Nonetheless, he was at the very least an impassioned critic of his country's social institutions, whose prose captured in vivid and often heart-rending detail the callousness of a system base on rank and privilege. Surely the great "Boz," as he has known, of all the British observers who crossed the Atlantic, would grant America and Americans a fair hearing.
Sam W. Haynes 45-46
32) Aspects of Old World gentility that reflect on herself and her readership determine Mrs Trollope's attitude to America. Domestic Manners is a record of the clash between old and new cultures, between Mrs Trollope in her capacity as English gentility's representative, and the various representatives of brash new America. She looks on the New World culture from a certain Old World perspective and finds America wanting in the comparison. A projected confidence in the rightness of her perspective adds authority to her engagement with the American condition. Her perception is, of course, the focal point of the book; a general impression of American society is channeled onto the page through her, informed by particular impressions of representative encounters. But she is herself representative of the culture, outlook and manners of her particular niche in English society. Her critical perspective implicitly gives an impression of England by comparison. Through her representations, a book that is essentially a personal response to social and cultural America becomes broadened to encompass the social and cultural structures of a traditional England.
Tim Worth 26-27
33) The Jefferson miscegenation story is a good example of a modern legend. Since the lore from which it derives cannot be established as true or false, it accommodates all sorts of variations.
Sidney P. Moss and Carolyn Moss 274
34) With the resumption of transatlantic travel after the War of 1812, the war of words quickly ratcheted upward as a new wave of curious Britons washed upon American shores. The British reading public was developing a hearty appetite for literature by those who ventured to foreign parts, and to the former colonies in particular. There soon appeared, in quick succession, a spate of travel books highly critical of the United States. Americans often learned of these works -- "many of which were intended as guides for potential emigrants and were therefore not widely available stateside -- "thorough the British literary periodicals, whose reviews, like the one attributed to Southey, usually added to an increasingly unflattering portrait of the young republic.
Sam W. Haynes 28
35) With liberty lying at the center of both nations' identity, its antithesis slavery permeated the dispute over national moral and political superiority carried on during war and entente by the United States and Great Britain.
Matthew Mason 666
36) Even without the Sally Hemings story, Jefferson was an obvious target for, much as he professed to hate slavery, he nevertheless kept blacks enslaved -- and that at a time when he announced to the world that all men are created equal and that liberty is among their inalienable rights.
Sydney and Carolyn Moss 274
37) Through her representations [Frances Trollope's], a book that is essentially a personal response to social and cultural America becomes broadened to encompass the social and cultural structures of a traditional England.
Tim Worth 27
38) She [Frances Trollope] reproduces incidents not primarily because they are entertaining, but rather because they are, in her view, illustrative and representative of essential qualities of American life.
Helen Heineman, "Domestic" 548
39) This gradual swelling of anti-British sentiment had many sources. For one thing, Americans by the mid-1820s were becoming more than a little irritated by the tone of haughty condescension that British observers saw fit to adopt when writing of the former colonies. In periodicals and scores of travels books, British authors derided the republic as a nation of money-grubbing, tobacco-chewing rubes, insults that hurt Americans all the more because they traditionally held the opinions of the British intellectual community in such high regard.
Sam W. Haynes 8
40) Lieutenant Edward Thomas Coke, who was traveling in the United States when Mrs. Trollope's book appeared in 1832, reported the excitement at length in his A Subaltern's Furlough: The commotion [her book] created amongst the good citizens is truly inconceivable . . . . At every corner of the street, at the door of every petty retailer . . . a large placard met the eye with, "For sale her, with plates, Domestic Manners of the Americans, by Mrs. Trollope." At every table d'hôte, on board of every steam-boat, in every stage-coach, and in all societies, the first question was, "Have your read Mrs. Trollope?" . . . And the more [her book] was abused the more rapidly did the printers issue new editions.
Sidney P. Moss and Carolyn Moss 260
41) The familial metaphor was well used by authors and politicians to explain colonial dissatisfaction with Britain. Yet even after independence, the language and the image of the family was retained because Americans still responded to their English heritage, however augmented that may have been by the demands of an emergent American nationalism. The image of the child grown up in pre-revolutionary literature was replaced by the young man making his way in the world, but still desiring parental approval, if not support. Independence did not sever familial ties; it merely changed the nature of the relationship. The disappointment and resentment evident in the American response in the Paper War stemmed from an intellectual and rhetorical history of an unsatisfactory familial relationship.
Jennifer Clark 57
42) And therein lay a dilemma for American patriots. Though keen for their country to be regarded as Britain's equal, they sensed, for all their bravado, that this was a distinction that was not theirs to bestow. Instinctively, they sought validation from the highest possible authority, from Britain itself. Yet the very act of doing so offered compelling evidence that the United States remained very much the junior partner in this transatlantic relationship. In exhibiting a yearning for British approval, Americans revealed their own doubts about the country's stature on the world stage.
Sam W. Haynes 5
43) The problem with Callender is that, though he could lie with a vengeance, he could also tell the truth.
Sydney and Carolyn Moss 254
44) From Columbus's voyage on, it became necessary for some Europeans, perhaps to justify a decision not to emigrate, to blame America for the most basic of Europe's problems and to find fault with nature in America -- both the landscape and the moral character of the people.
Patricia M. Ard 296
45) But the American relationship with Great Britain helps to remind us that the process by which nation states in the early stages of development arrive at a coherent self-image rarely occurs in isolation. Rather, it may also be driven -- even for those nations that later become superpowers -- by external, other-directed influences. The bonds of national belonging that create an "imagined" sense of community, to borrow from Benedict Anderson, are not always indigenous. More often than not, collective identities are informed to no small degree by how we imagine them to be perceived by others.
Sam W. Haynes 2
46) While Mrs. Trollope's intensely personal focus is her greatest strength, it is also the source of her greatest weakness.
Helen Heineman, "Domestic" 555
47) In short, for both Britons and Americans, disputes over slavery and national identity were mutually reinforcing and inextricably linked. Slavery could not be debated without reference to the nationalist controversies of the day, nor could those controversies escape slavery.
Matthew Mason 667
48) The first major American response to accumulated English opinion appeared in 1810. Philadelphian lawyer, Charles Jared Ingersoll, published Inchiquin, the Jesuit's Letters and set in motion a systematic volley of retaliatory comment in journals and books, some of which was abusive, some unreasonable and much indicative of mutual ignorance. It was Ingersoll's work, although mild in its defence of America and definitely unvituperative towards England, which the English publication Quarterly Review seized upon to bestow literary martyrdom.
Jennifer Clark 49
49) With Domestic Manners a publishing phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic, the British visitor with literary pretensions became a seemingly ubiquitous presence on the American scene. A veritable deluge of travel books followed, all hoping to repeat its extraordinary commercial success. In 1833 alone, the year after its release, no less than seven major works on America were published in Great Britain, and were soon widely available as reprints in the United States. Americans took it for granted that any traveling Briton they encountered would be writing a book about them upon their return home. It was not an unreasonable assumption. They hailed from all walks of life: actors and actresses fresh from theatrical engagements of the United States, social reformers on inspection tours of American penitentiaries and asylums, diplomatic representatives on official state business, clergymen attending ecclesiastical conferences, prospective immigrants who, like Frances Trollope, recorded their observations purely as a means of defraying their expenses. All saw their memoirs rushed into print by British and American publishing houses. On and on they came, with pens in hand, a never-ending conga line of the querulous, the censorious, and the simply curious.
Sam W. Haynes 37-38
50) The lasting appeal of her [France Trollope] work lies mostly in this brilliant selection of detail and the way in which she transforms her chosen material into representative and amusing vignettes of 19th century American life.
Helen Heineman, "Domestic" 545
51) So it was for the United States after 1815. While the nation's historical trajectory might seem straight and self-assured in retrospect, citizens of the early republic were in no way conscious of a "manifest destiny." For all its vaunted claims of distinctiveness, the young republic exhibited a set of anxieties not uncommon among nation states that have emerged from long periods of colonial rule. This is not to ignore the many differences between settler colonies and those of conquered peoples. But the challenge of reconciling two fundamentally opposing impulses -- "the desire to repudiate and emulate the ancient regime -- "is one that has confronted the descendants of colonizers and colonized alike. As elsewhere, Americans struggled to define their precise relationship to the imperial parent, with many still fearing its ambitions and resenting its lingering influences, even as they remained desperate for its validation.
Sam W. Haynes 2
52) The War of 1812 seems to have prompted many Britons to raise the issue of American slavery to attack the character and institutions of the republican upstarts. As more and more Britons came to investigate American conditions, they could not ignore the subject, as some prewar travelers had done. The crescendo of denunciations of American slavery coincided with and strengthened the postwar rise in tensions over slavery in the United States.
Matthew Mason 668
53) Domestic Manners of the Americans is a record of clash between old and new cultures, between Mrs. Trollope in her capacity as English gentility's representative, and the various representatives of brash new America. She looks on the New World culture from a certain Old World perspective and finds America wanting in the comparison.
Tim Worth 26
54) There was no greater testament to the limits of American independence than the extraordinary importance that citizens of the republic attached to British opinions. And of all those opinions, John Bull's views regarding their nation's prospects and development fascinated them most. Visitors from the British Isles would publish more than one hundred and fifty accounts of their travels in North America during the first half of the nineteenth century, while British literary quarterlies and magazines teemed with essays and editorials on the institutions, habits, and customs of the inhabitants of the United States. Though intended for a British readership, this enormous body of literature received far greater scrutiny stateside, poured over and debated endlessly by a self-conscious American public that exhibited a manic, almost compulsive need for foreign praise.
Sam W. Haynes 24
55) In these non-fiction works, both Trollope and Dickens read the American landscape through preconceived ideas of America and a need to assert the superiority of their own country in the most basic way.
Patricia M. Ard 294
56) American newspapers and magazines also abused Trollope's book, some specimens of which were collected under the title, American Criticisms on Mrs. Trollope's "Domestic Manners of the Americans" (London 1833). None of those attacks upon her book, however, took issue with her version of the Jefferson legend. The fact that none even mentioned Jefferson suggests that her charges may have been considered plausible or the refutation of them impossible.
Sidney P. Moss and Carolyn Moss" 260
57) The use of familial language indicates on what level this relationship was viewed in America. No better paradigm could encompass the peculiarities and contradictions of the Anglo-American experience, where the independent child "America" could desire both acknowledgement of its status and the comfort of parental encouragement and acceptance.
Jennifer Clark 64
58) The country's continued fascination with all things British had long been a sore point for those who had expected, naively perhaps, that a declaration of political independence would effect a complete separation from the Old World. Not only had the new republic been woefully unable to escape what Jefferson called "the broils of Europe" after the Revolution, but it had continued to be corrupted by "English books, English prejudices, [and] English manners," a state of affairs which, he believed, posed a greater danger than force of arms. After 1815, Americans became even more conscious of the web of transatlantic connections that rendered them, for all intents and purposes, a cultural and economic satellite of the British empire.
Sam W. Haynes 10