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.
