The book appeared on both sides of the Atlantic on March 19, 1832, when Fanny was fifty-three. It is a story of disillusion, of seeking and not finding, of the gap between expectation and reality. There is something true at the heart of Domestic Manners. The author refused to acknowledge any taboo, complaining about the way American museum curators covered up the penes of the statues. 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. Then she wrote Domestic Manners of the Americans. After three years Fanny slunk home with a suitcase of smashed-up dreams and three children incubating tuberculosis. 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). Fanny Trollope was broke when she turned fifty, and on intimate terms with pig manure.
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