Near Home, or, the Countries of Europe Described

 Favell Lee Mortimer - Near Home, or, the Countries of Europe Described (1849)

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This is where I regret using book titles for post titles.  Instead of that rather bland one this should be called "Arrogant Homebody Trash-Talks Foreigners".  The author did indeed write a kids book about the countries of the world but she couldn't repress, and apparently had no idea she was making, a stream of snide, condescending and prejudicial remarks.

Some examples:

"Have you not already found out the character of the Spainards?  They are not like the French, lively and talkative: they are grave and silent. They are not active like the Scotch, but indolent; nor warm-hearted like the Irish, but cold and distant; nor fond of home like the English, but fond of company."

"The Russians live in very miserable dwellings, made of trees cut down and laid along the ground one on top of the other.  The windows are very small, and some of them have no glass, but only wooden shutters.  In the middle of the room is a large stove that fills it with smoke."

"Do you think you should like Berlin?  I have not told you yet of the kennels, or ditches, which are found in every part, even near the king's palace, and which are so black and dirty, that the whole city is quite unpleasant in summer-time.  The Prussians think nothing of it, and say, 'Are not all cities like this?'"

"Do you not hope that these industrious, honest people [Belgians], love to read their Bibles in their pleasant cottages?  Ah! you will soon see that they know very little about God.  Alas! they worship idols.  They are Roman Catholics."


I didn't discover Mortimer - that credit goes to writer and editor Todd Pruzan (McSweeney's, Blender, New Yorker).  In 2005 he introduced her to the world with a selection from her travel books called The Clumsiest People in Europe: Or, Mrs. Mortimer's Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World.  It's still in print and an ebook is available.  (Mortimer hadn't been entirely forgotten though close enough - there were pieces on her in the (London) Times in 1933 and the New Yorker in 1950.)

Mortimer became a sensation in 1849 with The Peep of the Day, which instructed children in both reading and religion.  Having found her calling she wrote several similar books, the oddest of which is Reading Without Tears (1857).  It's full of blatant class privilege and at times resembles modernist poetry - one highly repetitious section describes the duties of a housemaid.  "She makes the beds and the cribs. / She shakes the mats and the rugs. / She bakes the cakes and the loaves" and so on for an entire page.

Mortimer wasted no time in helping children understand the world around them by producing Near Home describing Europe and then two volumes of Far Off for the rest.  Did I mention she never traveled?  All research was done from books.  Even if some of her sources were far outdated, Mortimer clearly made some attempt at accuracy which is why the books have more a disconnect than a straight rant.  As a hardcore evangelical she didn't like Catholics and often comes across more negatively about them than other religions.  (Still, even genuinely great writers can also be petty and narrow-minded as anybody who's read Graham Greene's book on Mexico knows.)

But Near Home is a compulsively browsable book.  Some more selections:

"Is there a king of France?  There have been many kings.  But the French often send away their kings.  The last king left his palace in great haste.  There were crowds under his window and he was afraid they would burst in."

"There are a great many other foolish amusements in Italy.  Sometimes people put on masks and run about the streets, and see whether anybody can find them out when their faces are hid.

"But many [German women] are not as fond of reading as English and Scotch ladies are.  When they read, too often they read novels--histories of people who have never lived.  It would be better to read nothing than such books."

"The chief town in Turkey is built by the sea.  Like many other towns it looks beautiful at a distance, but turns out, when you arrive there, to be very unpleasant."

"The Greeks do not know how to bring up their children."

Comic Poets of the Nineteenth Century

W. Davenport Adams (ed) - Comic Poets of the Nineteenth Century (1876)

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The last post was also humorous poetry but how can I help it?  April is the month of both poetry and fools.  This volume again has Carroll, Gilbert and Harte along with George Meredith, Austin Dobson and others making the tone a bit more toward the poetry than the comic.  "A Song of Good Greeks", for instance, is about how important classical Greek is to European thought.  It has such laugh riots as "For never was language at all,/So magical-swelling,/So spirit-compelling,/As Homer rolled,/In billows of gold".

Still, there's a collection of (printable) limericks (Walter Parke's "Nursery Nonsense"), extravagantly silly wordplay (Pennell's "How the Daughters Come Down at Dunoon"), a ballad parody (Oliver Wendell Holmes' "The Spectre Pig"), a Chaucer parody (Parke's "Ye Clerke of ye Wethere"), a tribute to salads (Mortimer Collins' "Salad") and so forth.

Poets at Play

Frederick Langbridge - Poets at Play: A Handbook of Humorous Recitations (1888)

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Two volumes of comic poetry might seem a bit much but this amount was probably meant so reciters would have a wide selection.  Skimming shows that these don't appear to be classics but the emphasis is on the comic not the poetry.  Best-known names are Lewis Carroll, Bret Harte and W.S. Gilbert (the book's dedicatee) but the bulk are unfamiliar.  Still, I can't resist "The Chimpanzor and the Chimpanzee" which could be a hoot spoken aloud (with its Professor Balaam Vermicelli Lepidoptera FitzApe) or titles like "Fugitive Lines on Pawning My Watch", "The Weather in Verse", "The Puzzled Census-Taker", "Christmassing a la Mode de Slumopolis" or "Villon's Straight Tip to All Cross Coves".

Falstaff and His Companions

Paul Konewka - Falstaff and His Companions (1872)

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"This Falstaffiade owes its origin to one of the strangest revivals of unauthentic tradition and distorted history."  The author of the introduction is referring to Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part One which took an old, certainly false story about the prince hanging out with common folk and transformed it into a play (apparently one of his most popular during his lifetime), along the way creating the indelible character of Falstaff.

For this book artist Paul Konewka (1840-1871) made silhouettes of Falstaff and other characters accompanied by quotes from the plays.  This introduction isn't clear but one source says Konewka worked by paper cutting and another that he worked by pen.  Konewka also did Midsummer Night's Dream and Goethe's Faust but neither seem to have been scanned.  Lewis Carroll mentioned him positively in a letter (May 7, 1878) though Konewka sadly never illustrated Alice.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds several of his works - none are online or on display.

Matrimonial Primer

V.B. Ames - Matrimonial Primer (1905)

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Another little sample of outdated humor, this time for couples about to be married.  Much of it is actually genuine advice even if mildly comic and is addressed to both man and woman.

A few excerpts:

If the soul of the woman did not appeal to you, regardless of its covering of clothes or flesh, you deserve disappointment, and will doubtless get it.

Even matrimony does not preclude individual brushes and towels, and, occasionally, opinions.

If you want everything as your mother used to make it, you will, of course, be willing to imitate her father in the size of your vest, checks, etc.

Don't marry a man thinking you can smooth him down or rub him up to your ideal.  If he does not appear ideal to your blind love, better leave him to some one more blind.

The Foolish Dictionary

Charles Wayland Towne - The Foolish Dictionary (1904)

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Another audio version is available.

The Foolish Dictionary is a brief collection of humorous definitions from Charles Wayland Towne, a New York Times reporter who covered the Spanish-American War and traveled with Buffalo Bill.  His papers are in Harvard's Peabody Museum archives though they mainly relate to an unpublished biography of Peabody.  In 1914 he wrote The Altogether New Foolish Dictionary (not on Open Library but can be found on Google Books).

The book lacks the bite of Bierce, is jocularly sexist (women always have the last word, marriage is a battlefield - that sort of thing) and I doubt will make anybody actually laugh but can be mildly clever.

Some samples:

BREVITY - A desirable quality in a Fourth of July oration but not in the fireworks.

DUST - Mud with the juice squeezed out.

GUNPOWDER - A black substance much employed in marking the boundary lines of nations.

MARK - In German, twenty-three cents. In the United States, only Twain.

PAIN - A sensation experienced on receiving a Punch, particularly the London one.

Literary Taste: How to Form It

Arnold Bennett - Literary Taste: How to Form It (1910)

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Another audio version!  Check the link above.

Among Bennett's journalism are a few self-help books - How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, How to Become an Author, Mental Efficiency and this work.  He takes a pretty reasonable approach, recommending, for instance, that when starting on poetry never think about metre or form, to avoid modern works at the beginning, if doing this is not "agreeable" then don't do it.  "The aim of literary study is not to amuse the hours of leisure; it is to awake oneself, it is to be alive, to intensify one's capacity for pleasure, for sympathy, for comprehension.  It is not to affect one hour, but twenty-four hours."

But the real reason I'm posting this is because of his book lists.  The development of canons and tastes fascinates me and I often check out older lists or anthologies to see how they've changed.  Walter Scott was once considered the pinnacle of novelists but is now only intermittently read.  The wonderful short story writer John Collier frequently made mid-20th century "best of" anthologies but is now mostly ignored.  Spenser has been in a long decline - I recently read a Virginia Woolf make the same claim in an essay over a century old now.  The changes in the reputations of Melville, Faulkner, Orwell, Defoe, the metaphysical poets and many others are well known.  In fact Arnold Bennett himself would be one example.

Bennett divides his list of recommendations into three periods, excluding works not originally in English (with some exceptions) and works of mainly historical value.  He's admirably broad, stating "literature is the vehicle of philosophy, science, morals, religion, and history" - an idea most modern interdisciplinary advocates say but rarely do.

The prose writers of the first period include several that are still read such as Malory, Bacon, Hobbes, Bunyan, Pepys, Browne (or at least I've read all those--though admittedly not all of Pepys--and see them mentioned enough that most likely others have as well) and many that are known but little-read such as George Cavendish, John Evelyn, Richard Hakluyt and William Temple.  The one completely unfamiliar to me is Lord Herbert of Cherbury's Autobiography but I'm not sure why it's mentioned - most of what I found talks about the author's theological works, apparently still on the Catholic Church's Index.  Nearly all the first period poets are still familiar except maybe Robert Greene (primarily remembered for his attack on Shakespeare rather than his own work) or Philip Massinger.

I won't go through the other periods this way except to note a few subjects for further research because what better way to increase web hits than mentioning writers nobody is searching for?  So Bennett lists such current obscurities as William Law, James Morier, G.J. Whyte-Melville, Mary Russell Mitford, Alexander Smith and T.E. Brown ("a great poet, recognised as such by a few hundred people, and assuredly destined to a far wider fame" - oops).  Bennett does list some "justifiably" omitted writers that include Oscar Wilde.

Frank Swinnerton released a revised edition of the book in 1937 (Bennett had died six years earlier) and he included a fourth period that went up to 1935 allowing it to include Conrad, Woolf, Waugh, Wodehouse, Forster and surprisingly Oliver Onions, now mainly remembered for his ghost stories.