"The Clumsiest People in Europe"

[fiefoe]

...": Or, Mrs. Mortimer's Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World" is the fruit of Todd Pruzan's fascination with this forgotten Victorian chidren's book writer.

Mrs. Mortimer's 'romantic tension' with a future Roman Catholic priest explains much about many of her pronouncements in the rest of the book.

Directly from his introduction:
    (A book for infants:) I hope that your body will not get hurt.... Will your bones break?-Yes, they would, if you were to fall down from a high place, or if a cart were to go over them. <> How easy it would be to hurt your poor little body! <> If it were to fall into the fire, it would be burned up. If a great knife were run through your body, the blood would come out. If a great box were to fall on your head, your head would be crushed...

    Mortimer's personal life could be boiled down to an index of Victorian misery and misfortune, which her niece Mrs. Meyer cataloged with vicious delight. After just a few chapters, the lives of Mortimer's family and friends devolve into a laundry list of spasmodic cholera, a face crushed by a wagon, erysipelas in the shins, the tail of a dressing gown set alight in a fireplace, influenza, water on the brain, an apoplectic fit, asthma, scarlatina, jaundice and pleurisy, blindness and deafness, bronchitis, and cerebral weakness.
 
    The lamb was also subject to sea-bathing; the problems of drying its soaked fleece my aunt solved with characteristic ingenuity:she had it left buried for a time in the sand with only its nose protruding.

1755 Lisbon earthquake
1852 Anti-Jewish riots in Stockholm