Vic Darkwood's opinion is that everything we moderns do, the Victorians did first, and with greater aplomb. Or that's Darkwood's satirical shtick, which he promulgates through The Chap, a quarterly magazine he coedits with fellow mock-dandy Gustav Temple. In How to Make Friends and Oppress People: Classic Travel Advice for the Gentleman Adventurer, Darkwood has penned a straight-faced guide to the lost etiquette of foreign expeditions, interspersing his own narration with passages and old engravings from actual Victorian manuals. More than just a farcical travel guide, Darkwood has written a scathing catalog of British attitudes toward other cultures and, in this reflective era, a a work of devastating self-satire.

Written in highfaluting prose and peppered with faux-Wilde witticisms, How to Make Friends is divided into chapters on such discrete topics as "Expeditionary Skills" and "The Englishman Abroad." Early on, the satire feels humorous enough — the absurd litanies of necessary clothing, scientific instruments, and carpentry tools that Darkwood recommends travelers pack are more than average people have in their homes today — but Darkwood doesn't shy away from taking real jabs at figures of modern travel, like "so-called 'backpackers' who clad themselves in gaily hued polyester." Nor does he flinch when depicting Victorian attitudes toward race in the later section "Foreign Servants," citing Victorian passages that compare the advantages of "a Madrassi" to those of "John Chinaman." Pictures of the Bentley & Simpkins servant transporters ("ideal for the economical conveyance of staff"), used to pack servants as luggage, jolt one out of the comfort afforded by the book's facetious tone. If Darkwood's for real, then the Victorians weren't just genial fools, but civilized barbarians.

Self-loathing has a distinguished history in British comedy, from Jonathan Swift to Ricky Gervais' David Brent in The Office. Darkwood's seamlessly deadpan tone leaves the reader at a loss for any real opinion of the Victorians. On the one hand, Darkwood truly does seem to be against mass-culture's debasement of life's finer pleasures, but he also illuminates the narrow-minded pomposity and downright offensiveness of those pursuits to begin with.

-H.G. Masters