While we're at it . . .

The first anti-slavery novel wasn't written by a "Yankee". It was written by Tory Englishwoman.

The British writer Fanny Trollope, also buried here, wrote the first anti-slavery novel and Hildreth wrote the second. Both books were used by Harriet Beecher Stowe for her Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Parker

Fanny's contribution to the cause was to be, in fact, the first anti-slavery novel, Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, ... It was published in April 1836, more than fifteen years before Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. http://books.google.com/books?id=XspAxo1fXdQC

In Common Cause: The "Conservative" Frances Trollope and the "Radical" Frances Wright:

Her intention [in writing Domestic Manners of the Americans] was clearly to write a book that was very different from her friend Frances Wright's Views of Society and Manners in America, published 11 years earlier. Referring to herself in the third person in her Preface to the First Edition of Domestic Manners of the Americans Frances Trollope declared:

Although much as already been written on the great experiment, as it has been called...she [the author] has endeavoured to show how greatly the advantage is on the side of those who are governed by the few, instead of the many. The chief object she has had in view is to encourage her countrymen to hold fast by a constitution that ensures all the blessings which flow from established habits and solid principles. If they forego these, they will incur the fearful risk of breaking up their repose by introducing the jarring tumult and universal degradation which invariably follow in the wild outcome of placing all the power of the State in the hands of the populace. (Mullen xxxiii)

Mob rule was very much associated with democratic processes in Frances Trollope's analysis of American society. Thus, Frances Trollope's first published work directly countered the views of the earlier, adulatory travel book on America by Frances Wright--and Frances Trollope immediately became the darling of the same Tories who had earlier attacked her young friend. [. . .]

Stereotyped ever after as the Tory conservative who wrote Domestic Manners of the Americans, Frances Trollope was, in fact, as Helen Heineman has suggested, "that strange anomaly, a Tory radical" [. . .] Frances Trollope completed 114 volumes--six travel books and 34 novels in all--many of which were works of social protest. Again Helen Heineman explains, "In using fiction to arouse public-consciousness about social abuses, Mrs . Trollope contributed an impressive list of 'firsts': the first antislavery novel, the first full-length exposure of evangelical excesses, the first novel on the child labor in industrial areas, the first attack on the bastardy clauses of the New Poor Law" [. . .]

Chapter Eight

Trollope, Dickens, Gaskell, Stowe and A. Trollope

We will never know just how great an influence Frances Trollope's works came to have on he contemporaries. We know, of course, that she dominated British fiction in the 1830s and 1840s. Percy Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens's friend, biographer, and contributor to Dickens's Journal, remembers, "in the forties she was the one and only 'fashionable' story-teller to be read, and certainly her 'Widow Barnaby' and other jovial tales gave great entertainments and was [sic] the pattern for a whole school of such things" (312).