cover image THE CLUMSIEST PEOPLE IN EUROPE: Mrs. Mortimer's Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World

THE CLUMSIEST PEOPLE IN EUROPE: Mrs. Mortimer's Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World

Todd Pruzan, Favell Lee Mortimer, . . Bloomsbury, $19.95 (208pp) ISBN 978-1-58234-504-8

This abridged version of a once-popular mid–19th-century children's geography primer invites readers to snicker—and snicker they will—at the prejudices of a bygone age. Mortimer, a forgotten author of children's books, rarely traveled and bowdlerized the information she got from other writers. Though an ardent abolitionist, she shared the knee-jerk racism as well as the religious bigotries of her day. She divides Europe between dour, hard-working Nordics and hot-blooded but idle Mediterranean types, damns Roman Catholicism as a form of idol worship and blithely notes such national idiosyncrasies as "[t]he Greeks... love singing, though they sing badly." But at heart she is a Victorian domestic reformer. Frivolous housewives who read novels and spoiled children who eat rich food and stay up late with the grownups constitute signs of national degeneracy, and virtually every country stands condemned of dirtiness (China, Wales, France, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Iceland and Switzerland) or drunkenness (Prussia, Sweden and Norway) or both (Scotland, Ireland, Russia and Poland). Pruzan, an editor at Print magazine, supplies an intelligent, engaging biographical introduction and adds some incongruous truth-content to the text by inserting short, prefatory facts on national economies and 19th-century history. It's an amusing diversion, one best read in small doses. (June)