“Planning a foreign trip? Wales might be nice. But unfortunately it is filled with Welsh people, who are “not very clean.” Spain might look alluring, but the Spanish tend to be “cruel, and sullen and revengeful.” Portugal perhaps? Tread cautiously. “Some places look pretty at a distance which look very ugly when you come up to them - Lisbon is one of these places.”
There is almost no incentive to step out the front door in the strange, cruel, wildly prejudiced guidebooks of Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer, a tough-minded Victorian children’s writer whose astonishing thoughts on foreign lands have been excerpted by Todd Pruzan in “The Clumsiest People in Europe.” Mrs. Mortimer, in three volumes published between 1849 and 1854, delivered crisp, no-nonsense opinions on peoples and countries from Sweden to Bechuanaland, even though her own foreign travel, at that point, was limited to a brief childhood trip to Brussels and Paris.”
