Note 39 — Chapter XXIII · ENGLISH CARICATURE OF THE PRESENT CENTURY.

Seeing caricatures from childhood has induced a habit in many persons of surveying life in the spirit of caricature, and has developed some tolerable private wielders of the satiric pencil. Mrs. Trollope was, perhaps, a case in point. Her volumes upon the "Domestic Manners of the Americans," the literary sensation of 1832, were illustrated by a dozen or more of very amusing caricatures, some of which were fair hits, and were of actual service in improving popular manners. There are persons still alive who remember hearing the cry of "Trollope! Trollope!" raised in our theatres when a man ventured to take off his coat on a hot night, or sat with his feet too high in the air.[39] Her whole work, pictures and all, was a purposed political caricature, as she frankly confesses in her preface, where she says that her chief object was to warn her countrymen of "the jarring tumult and universal degradation which invariably follow the wild scheme of placing all the power of the State in the hands of the populace." She was, besides, exceedingly uncomfortable during her three years' residence in the United States, except when she was so happy as to be served by slaves. "On entering a slave State," she remarks, "I was immediately comfortable and at my ease, and felt that the intercourse between me and those who served me was profitable to both parties and painful to neither."