What would England look like to someone who had never seen it? Robert Southey imagined the answer through Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, a Spanish nobleman writing home about his travels through early 19th-century England. The result is a brilliantly skewed mirror: watch an outsider puzzled by Sunday churchgoers, horrified by the food, baffled by English manners, and increasingly alarmed by the nation's political machinations. Espriella treats the familiar as exotic and the exotic as absurd, and in doing so, Southey achieves something his own contemporaries could not: a portrait of England with all its comfortable illusions stripped away. These letters observe everything from religious observance to social customs to the costs of war, written with the kind of amused detachment that only a foreigner can sustain. Three volumes of sharp, witty, sometimes waspish commentary on a society convinced of its own reasonableness. For readers who love epistolary fiction, satirical observation, or simply seeing their own world made strange.
