Trollope depicted a land of religious factions and sexual mania, the two sometimes closely connected. She complained of the boring uniformity of American homes, the noise and oniony stench of crowds, the scrawny women and hollow-chested men, the ‘general feeling of irksomeness … which hangs upon the memory while recalling the hours passed in American society’. Money was spent and discussed too freely. Diet was abundant and indelicate; food was seized at table with ‘voracious rapidity’, and teeth were cleaned with pocket knives. Women did not walk nicely. At the theatre, men sprawled grotesquely, and on one occasion she saw a man in the pit vomiting profusely, ‘which appeared not in the least to annoy or surprise his neighbours’.
Commenting on Americans’ enthusiasm for watermelons, she wrote that ‘their manner of devouring them is extremely unpleasant’, the juices pouring from each slice as it is ‘applied to the mouth … while, ever and anon, a mouthful of the hard black seeds are shot out in all directions’. Besides such specifics there were febrile generalizations: Americans were guilty of ‘overweening complacency and self-esteem, both national and individual’, and ‘in taste and learning they are woefully deficient’; confronted by the vastness of their country and its natural resources, they were busily ‘hacking and hewing their way through it’; and the ‘universal pursuit of money’ produced a ‘low tone of morality’. Philistinism was rife. Literature was unloved, but newspapers were adored. Magazines were full of trash, and people’s imaginations seemed to ‘kindle with alarming facility’.
Informality was a licence for savagery – a constant threat. Trollope noted a ‘familiarity of address’ that was ‘universal throughout all ranks’; as an example of ‘violent intimacy’ she cited her children being called ‘honey’ by one of the neighbours. Granted, there was something to be said for the idea that ‘any man’s son may become the equal of any other man’s son’. But if this was ‘a spur to exertion’ it was also ‘a spur to … coarse familiarity, untempered by any shadow of respect’, and while Americans boasted of the equality prevailing among them, evidence of slavery and of suffering was abundant. ‘You will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty,’ she wrote, ‘and with the other flogging their slaves.’
Trollope’s son Anthony, the novelist known for his chronicles of life in the fictional and distinctly matriarchal county of Barsetshire, would accuse her of flagrant exaggeration. He had been left behind in England while she travelled, resented his abandonment (he was twelve when she travelled to Nashoba), and argued that ‘No one could have been worse adapted by nature for the task of learning whether a nation was in a way to thrive.’ But Mark Twain, better qualified to judge the veracity of Frances Trollope’s account, wrote that it was true to life – a ‘sort of photography’.1
One of Trollope’s themes is ‘the incessant, remorseless’ spitting of Americans. She writes of the ‘vile and universal’ habit of chewing tobacco. She claims that American men have lips that are ‘almost uniformly thin and compressed’, and suspects that this is connected to ‘the act of expressing the juices of this loathsome herb’. Rather than dealing with the matter once, she refers again and again to spitting, ‘that plague-spot … which rendered male colloquy so difficult to endure’. She was not alone in observing the habit, or in finding it rebarbative. Charles Dickens in his American Notes (1842) wrote that ‘In all the public places of America, this filthy custom is recognized’ and in some places it is ‘mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the transactions of social life’. In 1858 Philip Kelland, a distinguished English mathematician, published his impressions of America as Transatlantic Sketches. He complained that ‘even the ladies in some districts speak with a lazy nasal twang’ and that ‘business men, seizing an opportunity to quit their desks for a midday meal, do not think it necessary to sit out three courses and a dessert’. Above all, he claimed, ‘Spitting is the monster vice of the country; next to slavery it is the great obstacle in the way of perfect civilization.’2
We know that the distaste for spitting was nothing new. But in the nineteenth century the objection to it became medical as well as aesthetic. It was associated with the spread of disease; after Robert Koch identified the tubercle bacillus in 1882, spitting was linked with the spread of tuberculosis. By the start of the twentieth century, 150,000 Americans were dying each year of TB. Crusaders for public health, in Britain and France and America, promoted an anti-tuberculosis message with religious vehemence. American cities passed no-spitting ordinances. Trollope would have been impressed. As it was, though, she found spitting incessant and unchecked.
Cultivated Americans regarded Trollope’s book with horror. One of its consequences was an increase in the literature of American manners: volumes that set a practical, clear and often pious agenda. Literature of this kind had previously been either imported or derivative. Among the early colonists, the elite read Castiglione and Guazzo; later generations took their lessons from Peacham and Brathwait, Allestree and Savile, and especially Chesterfield. Of the books written by Americans, Eleazar Moody’s The School of Good Manners (1715) was popular but based on earlier works (including Erasmus’s De Civilitate). As a teenager in the 1740s, George Washington wrote a list of the principles of good manners (110 in all), reproducing maxims that had appeared in an English version of a sixteenth-century French book. Thomas Jefferson fretted about this tendency to copy European behaviour; he set out his own ideas about a specifically American etiquette in a memorandum dated November 1803, but his main concern in it was to do away with the pageantry of political office.
The efforts of Benjamin Franklin were wider in scope and more original. In his autobiography he recalled how in 1726, aged twenty, he devised a programme by means of which he could cultivate, in sequence, thirteen virtues. The virtues Franklin listed were temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity and humility. Of these, chastity was understood in a way we might consider unusual, for Franklin wrote that sex was to be reserved ‘for health or offspring’ and should not be used to ‘the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation’.3 Franklin’s programme exalts virtues rather than manners, but is of interest here partly because he believes that personal growth is all about developing habits, and partly because he sees virtues as having practical uses – as instruments of worldly success, not just guarantees of heavenly reward. Franklin later elaborated his ideas of civility and good manners, always keeping in view this principle of utility and stressing the valuable effects of amiable compliance.
It was only in the 1820s, though, that a truly American literature of manners began to develop. As this literature grew, it created the illusion that America was a classless society. The reality was that inequalities were rife; manners were a means of obscuring this uncomfortable fact. One historian of American manners comments that ‘the plain, republican citizens of the United States have shown a remarkable appetite for ceremonious titles … cling[ing] to them as tenaciously as molecules of water to ethyl alcohol,’ though this is matched by ‘an ability to take the measure of pompous and self-important men’.4
In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville pictured the relationship between democracy and manners. In his masterpiece Democracy in America he wrote of the tendency for aristocratic societies to run according to rules that ‘adorn and hide what is natural’. By contrast, in a democracy manners are ‘like a thin and poorly woven veil, through which each person’s true feelings and individual ideas can easily be seen’. In the America de Tocqueville described, there was less politeness than in Europe, but there were also fewer disputes about rank and status. Society was comparatively unrefined, certainly, but it was authentic and straightforward. Henry David Thoreau, preaching the value of simplicity in the 1850s, wrote in his journal about the kind of men whose fine manners are ‘a lie all over, a skin-coat or finish of falsehood’.5
American writings on manners flowered in the years after the Civil War
of 1861–5. In this period, one of industrial progress and urbanization, the American gentleman ceased to hide behind a parapet of whiskers, and a concern with clean skin and fresh underclothes was usual among writers who aimed to teach respectability without surrendering realism. The historian Andrew St George observes that the mid-Victorian English etiquette book took everything for granted, finding its models among an established aristocratic class, whereas the American version argued from first principles.6 As he shows, the vital quality was ‘ease’: this in the sense ‘freedom from embarrassment’ rather than casual convenience. The new American guides to manners spoke optimistically of community, tranquillity and social cohesion, of openness and purpose.
These books had a strongly patriotic feel. Sarah Josepha Hale, a prolific poet and editor, published in 1868 a work with the title Manners; or, Happy Homes and Good Society All the Year Round. It contained chapters on ‘the importance of needlework’ and ‘pets and their uses’; in the latter she suggests that ‘The small wood-tortoise will be found to be one of the best, safest, and most convenient pets for little boys.’ Another sample statement: ‘Married women are usually more agreeable to men of thought than young ladies, because the married are accustomed to the society of a husband, and the effort to be a companion to his mind has ingrafted the habit of attention and ready reply.’ Hale’s writings may make us grimace or smirk, but she is astonishingly certain of her country’s excellence. ‘America has all needed means of making her history unparalleled in the reality of happy homes and good society,’ she says, and then: ‘there are, in the texture of American life, certain threads that, like telegraphic wires, reach across all obstacles, and awaken the sympathies of the world.’7
By the end of the century, it was common for American writers to declare that the manners of their country were superior to those of their former colonial masters. This could happen even in a volume with the title ‘Good Form’ in England, by an American Resident in the United Kingdom, which was published in New York in 1888 and intended to help Americans understand ‘how things are’ in England. It contained the stinging assessment that ‘Reversing in the waltz … is not “good form”. Why it should not be can only be accounted for by the fact that English men and women (whom candour compels me to say, after many years’ observation, are the worst dancers in the world) can’t reverse themselves, and therefore, in the spirit of “sour grapes”, excuse their awkwardness by stigmatizing what they only wish they could do as “bad form”.’ There was more in this vein, as well as a note of mystification in statements such as ‘in England, money has nothing whatever to do with social status’, and of outrage in the revelation that ‘there is a stupendous number of utterly occupationless men’, many of them ‘dependent upon an allowance … [to keep them] in genteel idleness’. American visitors to England also complained of mechanical behaviour and its results: narrowness of mind, narrowness of conversation. A 1901 volume outlining Etiquette for All Occasions claimed that the riches of English hospitality were abundant, but could be made available only ‘after one has passed one’s examination and been accepted’.8
The most striking feature of the new American literature of manners was the degree to which it was created by women. They wanted to improve themselves. They also wanted to improve their menfolk; as the domestic expert Marion Harland observed, the American man of the late nineteenth century did not take polish readily. The general tone was at once dismissive of European flummery and vigorously competitive. Much more than in Europe, the story of manners in America is one not of practices trickling down, but of people – women – reaching up.
18
‘You’re the most important person!’
the trouble with children
‘Before I left England,’ wrote Fanny Trollope, ‘I remember listening, with much admiration, to an eloquent friend, who deprecated our system of public education, as … paying little or no attention to the peculiar powers of the individual. This objection is extremely plausible, but doubts of its intrinsic value must, I think, occur to everyone who has marked the result of a different system throughout the United States.’
The raising of children, and not merely their education, was a subject that weighed heavy on Trollope’s mind. She saw in America an alarmingly unsystematic approach to all aspects of this, and concluded that ‘No people appear more anxious to excite admiration and receive applause than the Americans, yet none take so little trouble, or make so few sacrifices to obtain it.’ Trollope would have been astonished to discover that in the twentieth century America would be the fountainhead of ideas about child-rearing.
We are used to the idea that children are taught manners by their parents. The teaching involves more don’ts than dos. Exasperation is often audible. Few parents have the time to explain in detail the reasons why particular conventions exist; children grow used to hearing that certain behaviours are dangerous or rude. Conservatives argue that more time and effort should be spent on this instruction. For one such conservative, the American law professor Stephen Carter, ‘Teaching civility, by word and example, is an obligation of the family.’1
We are also used to observing that in practice children are much of the time not taught manners by their parents, who leave others to do the job. Typically this is because the parents don’t have the energy, inclination or patience to do it themselves. Parents are apt to argue that manners should be taught at school; teachers complain that manners are not taught at home. What is clear to both parties is that habits formed in childhood tend to last. It is as children that we learn, if we do so at all, to play fair, clean up our mess, and put things back where we found them.2 I can remember being taught these lessons: what I learned at school reinforced what I learned at home, or perhaps it was the other way round. The process undoubtedly involved the explicit endorsement of principles that had already been presented implicitly. I learned by precept, and by observation and imitation.
The concept of good parenting is a modern invention. In medieval society there was a limited awareness of the particular nature of childhood. Sustained interest in the nature and roles of children was rare before the seventeenth century, and until the later stages of that century English children were mostly treated in a controlling, punitive manner that at times became ferocious. While historians have exaggerated parents’ lack of tenderness, it is clear that children were considered neither innocent nor autonomous. Adults and children shared few activities. Children were peripheral and were regarded as property rather than the centre of the household.
John Locke, who in the 1690s argued that children should not be treated as little adults, is sometimes said to have ‘invented’ childhood. This is not quite right, but he did establish the belief that childhood is a key phase in the formation of character. Locke was influential in his conception of children as citizens in the making. He suggested that coercion and physical punishment, which aimed to instil conformity, were counterproductive. Children should be ‘tenderly used’ and ‘not be hindered from being children, or from playing’. Fresh air and comfortable clothes were important. So was learning through trial and error. Education was essential to the development of free, rational, functional beings. ‘Manners, as they call it … are rather to be learnt by example than rules.’
Locke saw the child as a blank slate. ‘God has stamped certain characters upon men’s minds,’ he claimed, and these cannot be completely altered, but they ‘may perhaps be a little mended’, and it is as children, when they resemble ‘white paper, or wax’, that they are best able ‘to be moulded and fashioned’. It was for this reason that Locke rather startlingly argued that children should be ‘wholly, if possible’ kept from talking with the lower sort of domestic servants. They risked picking up ‘tricks and vices’, and ‘the contagion of these ill precedents … horribly infects children.’3 Jonathan Swift would later remark on this in Polite Conversation, ironically observing that ‘a footman can swear, but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often, but c
an he swear with equal delicacy, propriety, and judgement?’ For Locke, servants should be ‘hindered from making court’ to children, which they might do ‘by giving them strong drink, wine, fruit, playthings, and other such matters, which may make them in love with their conversation’; the young should be ‘kept as much as may be in the company of their parents’.4
The eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau shared Locke’s conviction that honing children’s minds was among the chief duties of society. Children should play not on their own, but ‘all together and in public, so that there will always be a common goal toward which they all aspire’.5 Today we accept that playing is crucial to children’s development. Its purpose is not merely to allow children to blow off steam, but to practise activities that will continue throughout their lives, not least the regulation of aggression and arousal. As they play, children try on different roles, solve problems, understand stimuli, learn about sharing and intimacy, deal with conflict, and discover the limits of their power. If we fail to give them an opportunity to express themselves through play, instead channelling all their surplus energies into academic study, we produce young people who are socially inarticulate and inept.
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