In the days when Britain was the richest and most powerful country in the world, the Top Dog, and when it was the head of the largest empire the world had ever known, a Victorian British lady (who probably only step foot abroad into the lands of "savages" only once in her life) wrote travel books about foreign lands - and most of these places she hated and looked down on.
It gives a glimpse of the time when Victorian Britain was about to reach its imperial zenith as the world's superpower and when the British people looked down with pity on people - "savages" - from abroad as though they weren't lucky enough to be born British....
The mad world of Mrs Mortimer - the un-PC travel guides of a Victorian lady
by RICHARD PENDLEBURY
19th July 2007
Daily Mail
Politically incorrect: The 19th-century British writer Favell Mortimer (1802-1878 ) hated most foreigners - and wasn't afraid to let us know
Filthy French, lawless Aussies and awful Arabs...the eye-poppingly un-PC travel guides of a Victorian lady...
She really despised Mexicans.
The Spanish were also pretty bad. The Portuguese were like the Spanish but worse, and clumsy to boot.
And as for the Egyptians, they were simply beyond the pale.
The French could also do with a good wash and the Russians were absolutely filthy, though that didn't save them from being torn apart by wolves on a daily basis.
Gambling-stricken San Francisco was one of the planet's most wicked cities, while Rome ran it close, on account of the number of priests.
Idleness, alcohol, Islam and Roman Catholicism, though not necessarily in that order, were the "evils" found in heathen lands which most exercised the mind of Favell Lee Mortimer.
If she were alive and writing today, the remarkable Mrs Mortimer and her jaw-dropping views on the world would undoubtedly fall foul of any number of laws. Politically correct, she was not.
Nor a loss to the diplomatic service.
But 150 years ago, this parson's wife from Shropshire was the million-selling author of travel guides which advised England's youth on the perils and pitfalls awaiting them if they ever dared to leave this sceptred isle.
One can only marvel at the effect they must have had on Victorian would-be travellers.
Who, for example, would have been greatly encouraged to venture eastwards to Poland, where Mrs Mortimer vouch-safed "you may go a great way without seeing anything pretty" and the people "speak so loud they almost scream - and they are proud of this".
Even further east were the Russians, who were 'generally not to be trusted' and ran at great speed through the streets to avoid freezing to death.
Now, Mrs Mortimer's outrageous and gloriously politically incorrect vignettes have been collected in one entertaining volume that will be published later this year.
They serve as a fascinating snapshot of an age when, as Great Britain neared the zenith of its imperial powers, it was the national mindset that foreigners were to be pitied for the misfortune of not being British.
Pity, though, does not quite do justice to Mrs Mortimer's unrestrained disappointment in their myriad weaknesses, nor accurately describe her often random and hair-raising prejudices, backed by questionable anecdotal proof.
But if Mrs Mortimer's opinions are surprising, their provenance is even more so. For the truth is that Mrs Mortimer was no prototype Michael Palin.
She had never paddled up the Amazon, sailed the Atlantic to be robbed by Mexicans, priggishly tut-tutted in the convict-filled streets of "very wicked" Sydney, nor even clapped eyes on the Mediterranean shore along which, she asserted, the filthy and indolent Latin races lived their useless lives.
In fact, the woman who presented to her thousands of English readers this prism through which they saw the world had only stepped across the nation's borders once in her entire life.
That was a family jaunt to Brussels and Paris as a teenager.
So who was this extraordinary woman, and how had her splenetic view of the world been shaped?
Born Favell Bevan in 1802 in London, the future writer was the daughter of one of the cofounders of Barclays Bank. She was brought up a Quaker but, as a young woman, converted to the Evangelical branch of Christianity. Aged 39, she married a Shropshire clergyman called
Mortimer, but it was an unhappy union which lasted nine years until his death.
Perhaps by way of catharsis, Mrs Mortimer began to write about a world she had hardly seen, at a time when continental Europe was in the grip of political turmoil.
Her first volume, The Countries Of Europe Described, appeared in 1849 and her detestation of the Church of Rome was already quite clear.
Italy, she described as being "full of fine houses and palaces, empty and going to decay - but that is not the worst part - the people are ignorant and wicked. Their religion is Roman Catholic".
But it was only in her later books that Mrs Mortimer really hit her venomous stride.
By 1857, she had completed her series spanning the globe; she subsequently retired to Norfolk, where she died at the age of 76.
Taken as a whole, her "travelogues" perhaps tell us more about Mrs Mortimer than they do about 19th-century humankind.
Let us then take a whistlestop tour around her weird, worrying and largely imaginary world of foreigners. She is largely well-disposed towards north European, Protestant countries, or at least restrained in her abuse.
Icelanders are dull but honest, though their churches stink of fish to "almost make you sick".
She admires much that is German, save the ladies' reading of frivolous fiction.
"They are not fond of reading useful books. When they read, it is novels about people who have never lived. It would be better to read nothing."
On approaching the Middle East, Mrs Mortimer really sharpens her critical knife.
"The worst quality in any character is hypocrisy, and this is to be found in the Egyptian," she declares.
"It is a rare quality in Egypt to speak the truth."
In Bethlehem, she describes the statues of Mary and white crosses offered to visitors, before delivering the inevitable withering put-down: "They are very pretty. But they are idols. And God hates idols."
In Arabia, there are three evils: locusts, burning winds and want of water. "But there is one still greater - the religion of Mohammed."
Turkey is no better. She declares: "How dreadful it would be if our churches should ever be turned into mosques!'"
The neighbouring Kurds are the "fiercest people in Asia... The reason why the Armenians live in holes in the ground is because they hope the Kurds will not find out where they are".
Then she turns her gaze on China.
"We must allow that the Chinese are very clever," she admits, before describing them as "very selfish and unfeeling".
Mrs Mortimer's forays into the farthest reaches of the known world now seem unabashedly racist, though they are sometimes touched with pity for the suffering she describes there.
She calls for more missionaries to be sent to convert the Maoris of New Zealand - and quickly, because "Catholic priests are hastening".
What, though, of the world that she could see from her writing desk? This passage at least rings very true. "What is the character of the English?" she writes.
"They are not very pleasant in company, because they do not like strangers... They like best being at home, and this is right. They are very much afraid of being cheated; therefore they are careful and prudent, and slow to trust people 'til they know them.
"They are cold in their manners, yet they will often do kind actions. They are too fond of money, as well as of good eating and drinking. They are often in low spirits, and are apt to grumble, and to wish they are richer than they are, and to speak against the rulers of the land.
"Yet they might be the happiest people in the world, for there is no country in which there are so many Bibles."
Save for the last sentence, have we really changed?
----------------------
• The Clumsiest People In Europe: Or Mrs Mortimer's Bad Tempered Guide To The World, edited by Todd Pruzan, is published by Random House Books at £9.99.
dailymail.co.uk
It gives a glimpse of the time when Victorian Britain was about to reach its imperial zenith as the world's superpower and when the British people looked down with pity on people - "savages" - from abroad as though they weren't lucky enough to be born British....
The mad world of Mrs Mortimer - the un-PC travel guides of a Victorian lady
by RICHARD PENDLEBURY
19th July 2007
Daily Mail
Politically incorrect: The 19th-century British writer Favell Mortimer (1802-1878 ) hated most foreigners - and wasn't afraid to let us know
Filthy French, lawless Aussies and awful Arabs...the eye-poppingly un-PC travel guides of a Victorian lady...
She really despised Mexicans.
The Spanish were also pretty bad. The Portuguese were like the Spanish but worse, and clumsy to boot.
And as for the Egyptians, they were simply beyond the pale.
The French could also do with a good wash and the Russians were absolutely filthy, though that didn't save them from being torn apart by wolves on a daily basis.
Gambling-stricken San Francisco was one of the planet's most wicked cities, while Rome ran it close, on account of the number of priests.
Idleness, alcohol, Islam and Roman Catholicism, though not necessarily in that order, were the "evils" found in heathen lands which most exercised the mind of Favell Lee Mortimer.
If she were alive and writing today, the remarkable Mrs Mortimer and her jaw-dropping views on the world would undoubtedly fall foul of any number of laws. Politically correct, she was not.
Nor a loss to the diplomatic service.
But 150 years ago, this parson's wife from Shropshire was the million-selling author of travel guides which advised England's youth on the perils and pitfalls awaiting them if they ever dared to leave this sceptred isle.
One can only marvel at the effect they must have had on Victorian would-be travellers.
Who, for example, would have been greatly encouraged to venture eastwards to Poland, where Mrs Mortimer vouch-safed "you may go a great way without seeing anything pretty" and the people "speak so loud they almost scream - and they are proud of this".
Even further east were the Russians, who were 'generally not to be trusted' and ran at great speed through the streets to avoid freezing to death.
Now, Mrs Mortimer's outrageous and gloriously politically incorrect vignettes have been collected in one entertaining volume that will be published later this year.
They serve as a fascinating snapshot of an age when, as Great Britain neared the zenith of its imperial powers, it was the national mindset that foreigners were to be pitied for the misfortune of not being British.
Pity, though, does not quite do justice to Mrs Mortimer's unrestrained disappointment in their myriad weaknesses, nor accurately describe her often random and hair-raising prejudices, backed by questionable anecdotal proof.
But if Mrs Mortimer's opinions are surprising, their provenance is even more so. For the truth is that Mrs Mortimer was no prototype Michael Palin.
She had never paddled up the Amazon, sailed the Atlantic to be robbed by Mexicans, priggishly tut-tutted in the convict-filled streets of "very wicked" Sydney, nor even clapped eyes on the Mediterranean shore along which, she asserted, the filthy and indolent Latin races lived their useless lives.
In fact, the woman who presented to her thousands of English readers this prism through which they saw the world had only stepped across the nation's borders once in her entire life.
That was a family jaunt to Brussels and Paris as a teenager.
So who was this extraordinary woman, and how had her splenetic view of the world been shaped?
Born Favell Bevan in 1802 in London, the future writer was the daughter of one of the cofounders of Barclays Bank. She was brought up a Quaker but, as a young woman, converted to the Evangelical branch of Christianity. Aged 39, she married a Shropshire clergyman called
Mortimer, but it was an unhappy union which lasted nine years until his death.
Perhaps by way of catharsis, Mrs Mortimer began to write about a world she had hardly seen, at a time when continental Europe was in the grip of political turmoil.
Her first volume, The Countries Of Europe Described, appeared in 1849 and her detestation of the Church of Rome was already quite clear.
Italy, she described as being "full of fine houses and palaces, empty and going to decay - but that is not the worst part - the people are ignorant and wicked. Their religion is Roman Catholic".
But it was only in her later books that Mrs Mortimer really hit her venomous stride.
By 1857, she had completed her series spanning the globe; she subsequently retired to Norfolk, where she died at the age of 76.
Taken as a whole, her "travelogues" perhaps tell us more about Mrs Mortimer than they do about 19th-century humankind.
Let us then take a whistlestop tour around her weird, worrying and largely imaginary world of foreigners. She is largely well-disposed towards north European, Protestant countries, or at least restrained in her abuse.
Icelanders are dull but honest, though their churches stink of fish to "almost make you sick".
She admires much that is German, save the ladies' reading of frivolous fiction.
"They are not fond of reading useful books. When they read, it is novels about people who have never lived. It would be better to read nothing."
On approaching the Middle East, Mrs Mortimer really sharpens her critical knife.
"The worst quality in any character is hypocrisy, and this is to be found in the Egyptian," she declares.
"It is a rare quality in Egypt to speak the truth."
In Bethlehem, she describes the statues of Mary and white crosses offered to visitors, before delivering the inevitable withering put-down: "They are very pretty. But they are idols. And God hates idols."
In Arabia, there are three evils: locusts, burning winds and want of water. "But there is one still greater - the religion of Mohammed."
Turkey is no better. She declares: "How dreadful it would be if our churches should ever be turned into mosques!'"
The neighbouring Kurds are the "fiercest people in Asia... The reason why the Armenians live in holes in the ground is because they hope the Kurds will not find out where they are".
Then she turns her gaze on China.
"We must allow that the Chinese are very clever," she admits, before describing them as "very selfish and unfeeling".
Mrs Mortimer's forays into the farthest reaches of the known world now seem unabashedly racist, though they are sometimes touched with pity for the suffering she describes there.
She calls for more missionaries to be sent to convert the Maoris of New Zealand - and quickly, because "Catholic priests are hastening".
What, though, of the world that she could see from her writing desk? This passage at least rings very true. "What is the character of the English?" she writes.
"They are not very pleasant in company, because they do not like strangers... They like best being at home, and this is right. They are very much afraid of being cheated; therefore they are careful and prudent, and slow to trust people 'til they know them.
"They are cold in their manners, yet they will often do kind actions. They are too fond of money, as well as of good eating and drinking. They are often in low spirits, and are apt to grumble, and to wish they are richer than they are, and to speak against the rulers of the land.
"Yet they might be the happiest people in the world, for there is no country in which there are so many Bibles."
Save for the last sentence, have we really changed?
----------------------
• The Clumsiest People In Europe: Or Mrs Mortimer's Bad Tempered Guide To The World, edited by Todd Pruzan, is published by Random House Books at £9.99.
dailymail.co.uk
Last edited:
