The Clumsiest People in Europe, or: Mrs Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World by Mrs Mortimer (edited by Todd Pruzan)

A bit of humour for this Sunday’s posting — not exactly social satire, unless you think that bad Victorian-era writing satirises itself. In this case, it might just qualify as such.

The Clumsiest People in Europe, or: Mrs Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World by Mrs Mortimer (edited by Todd Pruzan)

The word ‘Victorian’ can be and is often used as something of a perjorative term, with the meaning ‘narrow-minded’ or ‘prudish’. It’s safe to say that there’s a good reason for doing so at times, especially in connection with clothing styles, moral instruction, or anything related to Oscar Wilde. Victorian cautionary tales for children are as grim and ghoulish as the more traditional fairy-tales, always reminding the young that death is an ever-present part of life and that wicked boys and girls are always punished severely (and good isn’t always rewarded in equal measure). So in that respect, it may not be so surprising that a Victorian children’s book that talks about the various peoples of the world would be long on criticism and short on pleasantness.

This is where Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer’s books come in: three books, to be precise, all written in the mid-nineteenth century. Each book purports to be a guide to the different countries of the world and the people who inhabit those countries (one book deals with Europe, one with Africa and Asia, and one with the Americas and Australia), and Mrs Mortimer manages to find some kind of fault with just about everything and everyone. Each description of a country comes complete with a slew of disapproving comments. Norway might be a beautiful country, with kind and good-hearted and honest people, but ‘The greatest fault of the Norwegians is drunkenness‘. Amsterdam is noteworthy mostly because ‘there is no city in which there is so much danger of being drowned, because it is full of canals‘. The Irish are (horror!) Roman Catholic, which is ‘a kind of Christian religion, but it is a very bad kind‘. When Greeks are unhappy, they are known to ‘scream like babies‘. Mrs Mortimer doesn’t even have many kind words for her own countrymen, though she does take pains to remind her young and impressionable readers of a very simple thing: ‘What country do you love best? Your own country. I know you do‘. Not surprising, considering her overwhelmingly negative opinions on the various bits of Europe that aren’t England proper.

The world outside of Europe is really far worse, though, in her eyes. Most of Africa can be written off as a land of ignorant savages, nasty cannibals, and Mohammedians who read a very wicked book that is made of evil stories and lies. Australia is full of convicts and colonists, of course. The people of Siam resemble the people of Burma, ‘but they are much worse-looking‘. The Chinese are elegant people, but are quite mad. In North America, Washington, DC, is ‘one of the most desolate cities in the world‘ — and most Americans keep slaves, which is an abominable sin. The list goes on and on, to the point where you almost can’t decide whether to laugh at her opinions or bang your head against a wall to get her prissy, disdainful tones out of your ears.

Why is this book worthy of a read-through, then? Well, for starters, Mrs Mortimer wrote the book without ever having left England and with only a limited knowledge of England itself. All of her opinions came from other works and from a mass of different sources — one look at her writings gives a hint as to how respectable Englishmen and Englishwomen of the day looked at other countries within the comforting blanket of the waxing British Empire. Her books went through several editions in her lifetime, and it’s safe to say that Mrs Mortimer’s bad-tempered guides to the Victorian world had a marked influence on young children’s first impressions of other lands and other people. Echoes of her sentiments appear even today in classical stereotypes of ‘foreigners’. Sometimes, it’s a good idea to go back and see where and how certain stereotypes have been reinforced over the years…and with Todd Pruzan’s careful editing of these mostly-forgotten children’s books, it’s possible to look at the world through a decidedly ‘Victorian’ lens.

The First Guide to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union by Avram Shifrin

I was looking for a suitable book to post to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the October Revolution, but it seems that I’ve already gone through and posted most of my previously written USSR-related book reviews…except for this one. And since I don’t have my copy of my perennial favourite title, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, with me at the moment, this book is the next obvious candidate.

A bit of backstory on how I acquired it: When one of my undergraduate history professors retired, he invited those of us who were taking his class on modern Russian history to come to his office and take anything we wanted off his bookshelves. He’d already gone through and cleared out all the books he had room for and wanted to keep, and he figured that it would be a lot easier for his students to clear off the shelves for him before he took the rest of the books to be recycled or donated….and no, I didn’t actually trample anyone in my haste to get to his office once the lecture had ended. That said, one of the books I made off with was this one.

The First Guide to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union by Avram Shifrin

As the title says, it’s a guidebook, first published by a Soviet dissident in the early 1980s. And by a guidebook, I mean that it gives general (and sometimes quite specific) locations of Soviet prisons and labour camps, the remaining substance of the gulag, broken down by area and region and type of prison. The guidebook even goes so far as to mention the type of labour that is done or thought to be done at each prison, whether in heavy industry or manufacturing…or the ’special’ camps where prisoners worked to mine radioactive materials (without adequate shielding) or performed tasks that can only be described as murderous (such as cleaning the nozzles on nuclear submarines). Also included in the guidebook are the location of politico-psychiatric facilities where prisoners were often held, generally with no attempt made to separate political prisoners from the actually insane. And since the book is written and edited by a man who spent several years in the prison camp system, based on research he compiled with others who had fallen foul of the Soviet justice system, there’s an authenticity to it that has to be seen to be fully understood.

This book is almost certainly out of print, and probably only available in used bookshops if anywhere. I only managed to get my hands on a copy by chance. But it’s absolutely chilling to read, because it shows the depth and breadth of the prison camp system in the USSR years after Stalin’s death. When you look at the book and think that every little dot on the map represents anywhere from two dozen to several hundred human lives, many imprisoned for their dissenting opinions or even their well-meaning attempts to reform their political system…well, it wasn’t so long ago, historically speaking. Shifrin’s guidebook manages to bring home the reality of the gulag in a way that few purely academic texts can hope to emulate.

Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley

I was quite surprised to see the response to my last language-related post. I doubt I’ll get the same reaction for this one, but it’s as interesting a book as the other one was.

Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley

Most books that deal with threatened or extinct languages set out from the start to demonise English. I’ve seen the words ‘parasitical’, ‘pernicious’, and ‘malignant’ used to describe the effect of the English language on other languages in the world. Mark Albey’s book does point to the spread and popularity of English as a significant factor in the decline of many languages, but instead of simply lamenting the loss of some of the world’s more complex tongues, he takes the time to go to places in the world where languages that were threatened with dying out have made a comeback, or are trying to make a comeback. And more importantly, he attempts to analyse the success stories, and see if there are ways that techniques used by revitalised language-speakers can be harnessed to save languages that have not been so fortunate in the past few decades.

In Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, Abley travels to remote villages in Australia and the American Southwest, to the Isle of Man and to the south of France and to the Caucasus mountains in search of languages that are struggling against extinction. As well as indigenous languages, he also explores the languages of immigrant communities, most notably when he interviews a group of Yiddish speakers in his native Canada. And arguably the best parts of the book are the parts where he speaks about the languages themselves, describing patterns of speech and turns of phrase that would sound unutterably alien to a native English speaker but which are extremely revealing about a language’s history and its ties to the culture in which the language developed.

All in all, Abley argues, it is the linguistic ties to culture that makes the preservation of languages so important. The subject-verb-object structure of English says quite a bit about the importance of the self/subject to an English speaker, but what can be inferred about culture from a language where the subject appears in the middle of the verb, or where verbs can exist without separate subjects, or where the concept of both subject and verb don’t really exist in that language? Spoken Here is a travel book and a linguistics book combined, and the combination works well enough to make it worth looking at.

Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast by Charlie Connelly

Not your usual travel book, for this book revew posting.

Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast by Charlie Connelly

The Shipping Forecast, for those who’ve never heard of it before, is the maritime weather report for the British Isles. Broadcast four times per day, for many years it was essential to the safety of commercial shipping and fishermen, who would be out in freezing, dangerous seas with very little forewarning of changes in wind speed and direction or the possibility of severe weather beyond the horizon. There’s a very strict reporting pattern that must be followed — for example, the entire forecast must be read clearly and carefully at dictation speed, and it cannot exceed 350 words. Nowadays, with GPS systems and advanced weather-tracking techniques, the Shipping Forecast is not so much a matter of life-or-death as it was in years past. But Charlie Connelly, the author of Attention All Shipping, thought that this aspect of nautical history was worth a more in-depth exploration…and decided that within the space of a year, he would visit (or at least cross through) every single region mentioned in the broadcast.

Connelly breaks up his book into chapters by region, beginning with ‘Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire’ and ending with ‘Trafalgar’ (which until is only mentioned during the 0048 report). Since several of the regions are entirely water, the bulk of the book consists of Connelly’s experiences in icy Scandinavian coastal villages, where the weather is inhospitable and the cost of a beer is exorbitant. (Connelly’s complaints about the costs of alcohol grow a trifle irritating after a while, but then again you have to give him credit for travelling to a number of godforsaken locations where alcohol might’ve made things slightly more bearable.) There are some truly moving sections in the book, particularly one where Connelly visits a station of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, an entirely volunteer-funded and volunteer-run organisation that has saved countless lives in treacherous seas around Britain. And you can’t help but feel sorry for him (or savour a little schadenfreude) at his recollections of gut-wrenching seasickness as he attempts to travel through gale-force winds on his way from one region to another.

If you’ve grown up listening to the soporific drone of ‘Forties, Cromarty, Forth’, then you’ll enjoy reading about one man’s journey through a Radio 4 institution. And even if you’ve never heard the Shipping Forecast before, it’s still a good travel book that’s definitely off the beaten path.

Metro Maps of the World, 2nd Edition by Mark Ovenden

I freely admit to being something of a trainspotter. Not in the sense that I write down engine numbers in little books, but in the sense that I admire the organisation involved in the smooth running of public transportation. I do hope that this review doesn’t make me sound a complete anorak.

Metro Maps of the World, 2nd Edition by Mark Ovenden

I’m fond of maps, and the development of maps and map design. The ways in which we display information intended for public use is a particularly fascinating subject, bringing together all kinds of aspects of semiotics, information management, graphic design, and overall aesthetics. So Mark Ovenden’s Metro Maps of the World sets my heart a-fluttering in a way that rather defies its status as a book that seems to be meant for display on a coffee table.

The book shows the development of underground/metro systems in cities all over the world, and more specifically, the development of their mapping systems. Due reverence is paid to Harry Beck, the Englishman who revised the way that metro maps were created — instead of showing how the London Underground lines really looked to scale with a London street map, he simplified the design into a cleaner, more readable format that is more of a diagram than a proper map. (Here’s an image of Beck’s revised Tube plan from the early 1930s; compare it to one of the pre-Beck maps.) But Metro Maps of the World covers more than just London. Ovenden’s book compiles historical maps of the world’s major metro systems, from the Moscow Metro to the New York City subway, from Berlin’s U-bahn to Tokyo’s TRTA/TOEI system. There are sections in the book devoted to smaller systems that are no less intricate in design, as well as metro systems whose construction is still being planned.

Gorgeously illustrated and rich in detail, Metro Maps of the World is utterly fascinating to anyone who has attempted to navigate the metro system of a major city. And if you plan to visit any major city in the near future, the book might also be terribly useful from a practical standpoint. Better to get an idea of how the maps work when you’re still at home, after all — it certainly beats standing in front of a metro map and feeling panic rising in your stomach when you realise that you’ve no idea how to get where you want to go.