ABSTRACT
On 3 August 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote to her sister Lady Mar, reporting her arrival in Rotterdam on the first stage of her journey to Turkey, where she was to accompany her diplomat husband on his embassy. In good spirits despite a rough crossing of the Channel, Lady Mary wrote enthusiastically about the cleanliness of the Dutch port and the commercial spirit of its inhabitants. She was ‘charm’d’ by the neatness of the town, its streets scrubbed daily by maid servants, so clean that she could walk about in her slippers ‘without receiving one Spot of dirt’. This was a town ‘full of people with such busie faces all in motion’, its shops and warehouses ‘filled with an incredible Quantity of fine Merchandize, and so much cheaper than what we see in England’. Above all, she noted, ‘Here is neither Dirt nor Beggary to be seen. One is not shock’d with those loathsome Cripples so common in London, nor teiz’d with the Importunitys of idle Fellows and Wenches that chuse to be nasty and lazy’. 1
