In May 1862, as the American Civil War was entering its second year, the English novelist Anthony Trollope, who had just returned from a year’s travel around the United States, likened the US Constitution to a pair of old boots. He meant it as a compliment. 

“When a man has walked for six months over stony ways in the same boots, he will be believed when he says that his boots are good boots,” even if “a stitch or two has come undone” or “some required purpose has not effectually been carried out,” Trollope wrote in his two-volume study, North America. “The boots have carried the man over his stony roads for six months, and they must be good boots. And so I say that the constitution must be a good constitution.”

Trollope had voyaged to the US to research a book on “the present social and political state of the country”. In this project, he was following in the footsteps of his equally famous mother, Frances Trollope. Three decades earlier, she had chronicled her four years spent in the US in her bestseller, Domestic Manners of the Americans.

Read more at Prospect