The book was both highly controversial and highly successful, selling "like wildfire". It also enabled its author to become a wage-earner and save her family from penury.[2] American author Mark Twain was amused and impressed by Trollope's observations of the Antebellum frontier America he grew up in: "Mrs Trollope was so handsomely cursed and reviled by this nation [for] telling the truth...she was painting a state of things which did not change at once...I remember it."[3] Benjamin Perley Poore noted the energy with which her book reviled the frontier habit of expectoration. "So often did Mrs. Trollope recur to this habit," Poore wrote, "that she managed to give one the impression that this country was in those days a sort of huge spittoon."[4]
The Quarterly Review praised Trollope's humour and descriptive skill:
... 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.' In this spirit we have read Mrs. Trollope's book with interest and instruction—we may add, with great amusement; for it is written with much humour, and is eminently graphic throughout,—touching with singular skill, a vast variety of topics, which, perhaps, only a female eye could correctly appreciate, or a female pen do justice to in description.[5]
According to Katherine Moore (writing in 1985), Trollope "had no profundity of thought...but she had a seeing eye and a lively pen". Her descriptions are "never boring: she makes us see the lonely clearings and farms, the huge silent rivers, Niagara, untamed and unvulgarised, the clear bright air ..."[2]
In a 1836 letter to the Ministry of War, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna quoted Trollope as an anti-slavery intellectual whose example must be followed. [6]
