She briefly stayed at the Nashoba Commune, a utopian settlement for ex-slaves set up by Frances Wright in Tennessee, but was dismayed by the primitive conditions.

The book created a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, as Frances Trollope had a caustic view of the Americans and found America strongly lacking in manners and learning.

Trollope was also harshly critical of slavery of African Americans in the United States, and by the popularity of tobacco chewing, and the consequent spitting, even on carpets.

Nothing is so easy as speculating in our closets on the probable effects of any given arrangement of public affairs; and if the results of such imaginary politics were confined to the Utopias in which their ingenious authors gave them birth, we should have no objection to their theories.

But when they are boldly obtruded upon the notice of the country as formulæ for actual practice, we feel it our duty, not to take these speculative conclusions for granted, but to turn the ' telescope of truth' to the existing facts themselves, and through the medium of an intelligent traveller's optics, ' bring life near in utter nakedness.'