I was just reading today about Francis Trollope and her take on the US. A piece in the NYer, by Simon Schama, on the history of european opinion on the US. M'self, I haven't read any Trollopes. Yet.
The Schama piece was really about British takes on the US since he didn't deal with DeTocqueville or DeCrevecoeur.
I am deep into THE PICKWICK PAPERS and loving it. Amazing that Dickens was only 24 when he wrote it. What a prodigy he was! As a sheer comic tour de force I don't think there's anything in English to surpass PICKWICK.
I didn't remember this as wholly an British take on things, and glanced back at the article, which is in the Mar 10 New Yorker. Sure enough he mentions a Norwegian, an English radical, the French, the twenty-three year old Scot, a German poet, a Dutch naturalist...and I stop there w/o going further.
Well, I read fairly lightly, LarryR, I need to look several times to absorb a lot of data and spout it back, but this is at hand.
I brought the piece up in reference to the surname Trollope.
That's his mommy, Osso. The book is wonderful. (My NYorkers arrive by donkey, so I haven't seen the Schama piece yet but there's another writer I admire a whole lot. See Landscape and Memory...)
You may be right, Ossobuco, but my point is still valid...Schama didn't deal with the most significant foreign view of America in the 19th century, which was Alexis de Tocqueville's DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, a book which continues to be relevant to this day.
