1 MERELY TELLING THE TRUTH Fanny Trollope Goes to Ohio Fanny Trollope was broke when she turned fifty, and on intimate terms with pig manure. She had made the three-month trek to Cincinnati, she said, "to hatch golden eggs for my son." The frontier might have glittered, but not all of it was gold-Cincinnati turned out to be one big stinky pig factory (Easterners knew it as "Porkopolis," if they knew it at all). After three years Fanny slunk home with a suitcase of smashed-up dreams and three children incubating tuberculosis. Then she wrote Domestic Manners of the Americans . The voice that sings from its pages speaks with the inflections of another age, but it is Fanny's voice: stylish and pithy, elegant, sardonic and witty. The author refused to acknowledge any taboo, complaining about the way American museum curators covered up the penes of the statues. There is something true at the heart of Domestic Manners .

It is a story of disillusion, of seeking and not finding, of the gap between expectation and reality. The book appeared on both sides of the Atlantic on March 19, 1832, when Fanny was fifty-three. A British subaltern in New York reported, "The Tariff and Bank Bill were alike forgotten … At every corner of the street, at the door of every petty retailer of information for the people, a large placard met the eye with, 'For sale here, with plates, Domestic Manners of the Americans , by Mrs. Trollope.' At every table d'hôte, on board of every steamboat, in every stagecoach, and in all societies, the first question was 'Have you read Mrs Trollope?' The more it was abused the more rapidly did the printers issue new editions." In Britain the book whizzed through multiple reprints within weeks, and when Fanny's son Anthony produced his first novel, his roguish publisher placed adverts naming the author as MRS . Trollope. The family finances were at last secure, and Fanny's harrowing American experience brought her freedom in the long run.

No wonder she laughed at the personal attacks pouring from the United States. A lithograph was published depicting a fat grotesque (her), a mysterious young artist friend with a brush in his mouth, and her husband in front of a stag's head sporting cuckold's horns. A waxwork in New York represented Fanny as a goblin, and a traveling menagerie in Maine advertised "an exact likeness of the celebrated Mrs. Trollope" in which she appeared puffing on a pipe. "Trollopize" became a verb that meant "to abuse the American nation." "No other author of the present day," wrote a critic, "has been so much admired, and so much abused." On and on it went, for years. The author "Nil Admirari" published a verse epic called The Trollopiad about a band of pompous gentlemen travelers observing the United States.

Later, Fanny picked up one fan in America: Mark Twain. In his own maudlin middle years he took a library of European commentators on a nostalgic Mississippi voyage, and on the last page of his copy of Domestic Manners noted, in his sprawling hand, "Of all these tourists, I like Dame Trollope best." She was, said the master stretcher-teller, "merely telling the truth." He recognized in her his own unquenchable gusto for life. Meanwhile, in Britain, invitations tumbled through the letterbox. Fanny rented a flat in a top London square and hurried between parties. "Lady Louisa Stewart," she gushed to her son Tom, "told me that I had quite put English out of fashion, and that every one was talking Yankee talk." The young Dickens praised her.

"I am convinced," he wrote, "that there is no writer who has so well and so accurately (I need not add entertainingly) described America." Tory papers loved Domestic Manners while Whigs and Radicals noted that the author's background was not quite up to scratch. Britons can never escape their origins. In Anthony Trollope's novel Is He Popenjoy? , the Dean of Brotherton's father is a former groom. "The man looked like a gentleman," the author says of the Dean, "but still there was the smell of the stable." In Domestic Manners , Fanny insists that there should be a stable smell, so that one knew where one was-the alternative was a social free-for-all of the American kind. She needn't have worried. When the book came out, the cultural elite showed that hierarchies were alive and well in Britain.

They resented the author of Domestic Manners for entering their territory. The poet Robert Browning announced that Fanny was vulgar and pushy. Over the next few years, following the appearance of Domestic Manners , Fanny nursed her tubercular offspring with one hand and dashed out novels with the other, "So that," as Anthony put it, "there might be a decent roof for the children to die under." When there was nobody left alive to nurse, Fanny swanned round the great capitals: Prince Metternich escorted her into dinner and the last king of France held a ball in her honor. It was one of the most dramatic reinventions of all time. She loved life, and never gave up on it. "Of all the people I have known," Anthony wrote, "my mother was the most joyous, or at any rate, the most capable of joy." She was born Frances Milton in Bristol halfway through the long reign of George III, the Hanoverian known as The King Who Lost America.

Like me, she was descended from generations of hardy West Country stock. Her father was a parson and her grandfather a distiller, and she grew up on a street that runs between Clifton Hill and York Place, close to the Hot Wells spa where the slavers' wives took the waters. As a young woman Fanny moved to London to keep house for her brother in a dirty red-brick terrace sheathed in fog, and when she was thirty she married Thomas Trollope, a tow-headed barrister with a penchant for reckless schemes. Choleric (according to a colleague he was "industrious and disputatious in equal measure") and an original Casaubon, Thomas was compiling an ecclesiastical dictionary and practicing law in what Anthony described as "dingy, almost suicidal chambers at No. 23 Old Square, Lincoln's Inn." At home at 16 Keppel Street the couple shared a ruinous sense of entitlement that led to the purchase of French marquetry desks, grand pianos and glazed wallpaper, and they maintained a minimum staff of half a dozen. During the first decade of their marriage they produced seven children and regularly leaped over the back wall to escape a creditor. "My father," wrote Tom, their eldest, "was a poor man, and his establishment [the chambers] altogether on a modest footing.

But it never would have occurred to him or to my mother that they could get on without a manservant in livery." When Thomas senior's law practice finally petered out, the family abandoned London for Harrow on the Hill, five miles outside the city, first renting a farmhouse, then leasing land to build a larger home with French windows, a lawn and a commodious parlour. Thomas was determined to set up as a gentleman farmer. The project, Anthony said, was to be the grave of all his father's hopes, ambitions and prosperity. Calomel prescribed for sick headaches raised Thomas' cantankerous outbursts to new heights (no wonder-it is mercurous chloride). "He is a good, honourable man," Fanny confided to a friend, "but his temper is dreadful-every year increases his irritability-and also its lamentable effects upon the children." Two of the seven children died: one a baby, the other, the beloved Arthur, at the age of twelve. Fanny, undiminished, held the family together.

Thomas was, according to Tom, "a highly respected but not a popular or well-beloved man. Worst of all, alas! he was not popular in his own house … My mother's disposition, on the other hand, was of the most genial, cheerful, happy, enjoué nature imaginable. All our happiest hours were spent with her; and to any one of us tête-à-tête with her was preferable to any other disposal of a holiday hour." He said she "carried sunshine." Fanny marched her brood through London's smoking gaslights and yellow fogs to watch Hamlet or Doctor Faustus , and once queued for four hours to see Mrs. Siddons play Lady Macbeth. She enjoyed dancing, hiking and throwing parties, and above all was a passionate reader: unfinished books lay about the house like partly eaten sandwiches. Fanny considered herself a progressive radical, and knew many of the freethinkers floating round the capital in the 1820s.

The Harrow farmhouse became a refuge for liberals seeking a temporary berth. When the red-haired writer and social reformer Fanny Wright appeared dressed in Grecian robes, she dazzled Fanny, and introduced her to the idea of America. Tall and lithe with milky skin and a substantial inheritance, the Scots-born Wright had visited the States twice and was passionate about that country's potential as a utopian democracy free from the conservative conventions of the Old World. She was close to the septuagenarian General Lafayette, the aristocrat who had served in the American War of Independence. (Washington said Lafayette was the only Frenchman he liked.) Wright had even accompanied the old soldier to America on his triumphal return tour in 1824; some said she had joined him in his bed. She stayed in America for two years, visiting Economy, a commune near P.