Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

This paper compares nineteenth-century travel accounts of two British women visiting the United States of America: Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans and Fanny Kemble’s Journal. Both writers focus on similar issues and are equally critical of the young republic; what they particularly dislike is its political and social equality, American manners, and what they see as the absence of literature and art. The paper argues that this strongly negative way of depicting America stems first from the literary convention of anti-Americanism, widespread in nineteenth-century Europe, and second from both authors’ wishes to elevate themselves while comparing their homeland with the “savage” New World.