The Rudest Travel Book Ever Written

Victorian writer Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer (1802-1878) was a woman of deep piety - and of even more profound prejudices. In the mid-19th century, she wrote the definitive travel guide to the world. There was just one problem: she had never set foot outside her native England.

The result is a scrutinizing of nearly every country in the world. My country, the Netherlands, comes out fairly well because she writes:

There is no people in Europe as clean as the Dutch... The poor children at school are much cleaner than English children. The Dutch are very industrious. The king will not allow big boys to stand idle in the streets. The policemen take up idle ragged boys, and send them into the country to drain the marshy grounds; so there are very few thieves, and hardly any beggars.

The Dutch children do not make as much noise at school as our children do. You hear no noise outside the school-house, and when playtime comes the scholars go out quietly. They cannot help making some noise with their feet, as they wear wooden shoes – and wooden shoes, I think, they must need to keep them out of the wet.

(via Nag on the Lake)