The most interesting book comments of the thirties were upon British travels in America. England did not like it when Hawthorne, in “Our Old Home,” called the British matron beefy. The United States did not like Dickens’s portrait of Col. Jefferson Brick, praising the ennobling institution of nigger slavery; of Prof. Mullit, who at the last election had repudiated his father for voting the wrong ticket; and Gen. Fladdock, who halted his denunciation of British pride to snub Martin Chuzzlewit when he learned that Martin had come in the steerage. At that period the United States was as sensitive as a callow youth. “We people of the Universal Yankee Nation,” remarked the _Evening Post_ in 1833, “much as we may affect to despise the strictures of such travelers as Fearon, Capt. Roos, Basil Hall, and Mrs. Trollope, are yet mightily impatient under their censure, and manifest on the appearance of each successive book about our country a great anxiety to get hold of it and devour its contents.”
Most Americans joined in indiscriminating complaints over the animadversions of the British travelers. A few were inclined to applaud the less extreme criticism in the hope that the sound portions might be taken to heart. Bryant thought that the country had been “far too sensitive” to Basil Hall, calling that naval traveler “a good sort of prejudiced English gentleman, who saw things in a pretty fair light for a prejudiced man.” He had a high opinion of parts of Miss Martineau’s travels, though he wrote his wife that she had been given a wrong impression in some particulars by Dr. Karl Follen and the narrow-minded Boston abolitionists. Twice he asked _Evening Post_ readers (1832–3) to remember that although Mrs. Trollope might be shrewish, she was also shrewd, and that if she had exaggerated some of the national foibles, she had sketched others accurately. In her “Domestic Manners of the Americans,” he believed, “there was really a good deal to repay curiosity. That work, notwithstanding all its misrepresentations, exaggerations, and prejudices, was a very clever and spirited production, and contained a deal of truth which, however unpalatable, has at least proved of useful tendency.” He called Capt. Marryat’s “Diary in America” a “blackguard book,” more flippant than profound, and deplored the fact that Charles Augustus Murray’s “Travels in America,” which was issued at the same time (1839), and was the work of “a well-disposed, candid, gentlemanly sort of person,” would not have one-tenth the sale. An excerpt from the dramatic criticism of the _Evening Post_ in September, 1832, shows how effective Mrs. Trollope actually was in improving our manners. At a performance by Fanny Kemble, a gentleman, between acts, assumed a sprawling position upon a box railing: