- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Arrow (26 Jun 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099509474
- ISBN-13: 978-0099509479
- Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 1.4 x 17.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 734,543 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Clumsiest People in Europe
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Product Description
Book Description
Comically insensitive and startlingly opinionated, Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer offers up a hilariously inappropriate account of Victorian prejudices.
Product Description
In the middle of the 1800s, Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer set out to write an ambitious guide to all the nations on Earth. There were just three problems:
She had never set foot outside Shropshire.
She was horribly misinformed about virtually every topic she turned her attention to.
And she was prejudiced against foreigners.
The result was an unintentionally hilarious masterpiece:
'The French like being smart but are not very clean.'
'The Japanese are very polite people - much politer than the Chinese - but very proud.'
'The Scotch will not take much trouble to please strangers.'
In The Clumsiest People in Europe, Todd Pruzan has gathered together a selection of Mrs Mortimer's finest moments, celebrating the woman who turned ignorance into an art form.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Funny at first, draining at last.,
By
This review is from: The Clumsiest People in Europe: A Bad-Tempered Guide To The World (Paperback)
Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer wrote prim, 'instructive' books for children in Victorian times. Three of her books formed a sort of guide to the world - though at the time of writing them she had only left England once, getting no further than Paris and Brussels. Consequently her perceptions are gleaned from other, unspecified sources.
Todd Pruzan in 2005 gathered a selection of her commentaries into this single volume. He introduces each country with his own potted picture of its circumstances at the time - a smattering of facts that are no doubt accurate, but also kind of random. Then Mrs Mortimer lets rip, blithely generalising about millions of people that she has never set eyes on: "The Poles love talking, and they speak so loud they almost scream." "No people in Europe are as clumsy and awkward with their hands as the Portuguese." "Though the Bushmen are counted among the most stupid of men, yet they can do many things better than any other Hottentots." The Egyptians are hypocrites, the Japanese wicked, the Chinese selfish and unfeeling... Vague anecdotes from anonymous "travellers" stand as 'proof' of the failings of entire peoples. Her evangelical christianity blinds her to the ironies in her condemnation of other religions. Why are the catholic Irish told not to read the bible? "Because these ministers or priests tell them a great many wrong things, which are not written in the Bible, and they do not want the people to find out the truth... It is a kind of Christian religion, but it is a very bad kind." All this is good sport, the complacent bigotry of another age; but it gets a bit wearing after a while, and I was glad the book was quite short. And to be fair to Mrs Mortimer, putting aside her blinkers and her curiously sadistic asides ("while the hyenas were feasting upon his wife's dead body"), she does actually mean well. She is staunchly against slavery, for instance, and as often (if as wrongly) ascribes positive qualities to whole populations as she does negative. She is ultimately a creation of her time, and perhaps too easy a target for the reader's laughter to be sustained.
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