Dickens's England (2 page)

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‘It is a community of purpose that constitutes society,' continued the younger stranger; ‘without that, men may be drawn into contiguity, but they still continue virtually isolated.'

‘And is that their condition in cities?'

‘It is their condition everywhere; but in cities that condition is aggravated. A density of population implies a severe struggle for existence, and a consequent repulsion of elements brought into too close contact. In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbours. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbour as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbour.' . . .

‘This is a new reign,' said Egremont, ‘perhaps it is a new era.'

‘I think so,' said the younger stranger.

‘I hope so,' said the elder one.

‘Well, society may be in its infancy,' said Egremont, slightly smiling; ‘but, say what you like, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed.'

‘Which nation?' asked the younger stranger, ‘for she reigns over two.'

The stranger paused; Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly.

‘Yes,' resumed the stranger after a moment's interval. ‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.'

‘You speak of — ' said Egremont, hesitatingly.

‘
THE RICH AND THE POOR
.'

Benjamin Disraeli,
Sybil
(1845)

AN AMERICAN VIEW

As soon as you enter England, which, with Wales, is no larger than the State of Georgia (add South Carolina, and you have more than an equivalent for the area of Scotland), this little island stretches by an illusion to the dimensions of an empire.

The territory has a singular perfection. The climate is warmer by many degrees than it is entitled to by latitude. Neither hot nor cold, there is no hour in the whole year when one cannot work. . . . Then England has all the materials of a working country except wood. The constant rain – a rain with every tide, in some parts of the island – keeps its multitude of rivers full and brings agricultural production up to the highest point. It has plenty of water, of stone, of potter's clay, of coal, of salt and of iron. The land naturally abounds with game; immense heaths and downs are paved with quails, grouse and woodcock, and the shores are animated by water-birds. The rivers and the surrounding sea spawn with fish; there are salmon for the rich and sprats and herrings for the poor. In the northern lochs, the herring are in innumerable shoals; at one season, the country people say, the lakes contain one part water and two parts fish.

The only drawback on this industrial conveniency is the darkness of its sky. The night and day are too nearly of a colour. It strains the eyes to read and write. Add the coal smoke. In the manufacturing towns, the fine soot or
blacks
darken the day, give white sheep the colour of black sheep, poison many plants and corrode the monuments and buildings.

The London fog aggravates the distempers of the sky, and sometimes justifies the epigram on the climate by an English wit, ‘in a fine day, looking up a chimney; in a foul day, looking down one.' . . .

A territory large enough for independence, enriched with every seed of national power, so near that it can see the harvests of the continent, and so far that one who would cross the strait must be an expert mariner, ready for tempests. As America, Europe and Asia lie, these Britons have precisely the best commercial position in the whole planet, and are sure of a market for all the goods they can manufacture. . . .

What we think of when we talk of English traits really narrows itself to a small district. It excludes Ireland and Scotland and Wales, and reduces itself at last to London, that is, to those who come and go thither. The portraits that hang on the walls in the Academy exhibition at London, the figures in Punch's drawings of the public men or of the club-houses, the prints in the shop-windows, are distinctive English, and not American, no, nor Scotch, nor Irish; but 'tis a very restricted nationality. As you go further north into the manufacturing and agricultural districts, and to the population that never travels; as you go into Yorkshire, as you enter Scotland, the world's Englishman is no longer found. . . .

The English uncultured are a brutal nation. The crimes recorded in their calendars leave nothing to be desired in the way of cold malignity. Dear to the English heart is a fair stand-up fight. The brutality of the manners in the lower classes appears in the boxing, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, love of executions, and in the readiness for a set-to in the streets, delightful to the English of all classes. The costermongers of London hold cowardice in loathing: ‘we must work our fists well; we are all handy with our fists.' The public schools are charged with being bear-gardens of brutal strength, and are liked by the people for that cause. . . . They use a plentiful and nutritious diet. The operative cannot subsist on water-cresses. Beef, mutton, wheat bread and malt liquors are universal among the first-class labourers. Good feeding is a chief part of national pride among the vulgar, and in their caricatures they represent the Frenchman as a poor, starved body. . . .

Man in England submits to be a product of political economy. On a bleak moor a mill is built, a banking-house is opened, and men come in as water in a sluice-way, and towns and cities rise. Man is made as a Birmingham button. The rapid doubling of the population dates from Watts's steam-engine. A landlord who owns a province says, ‘The tenantry are unprofitable; let me have sheep.' He unroofs the houses and ships the population to America. The nation is accustomed to the instantaneous creation of wealth. It is the maxim of their economists, ‘that the greater part in value of the wealth now existing in England has been produced by human hands within the last twelve months'. Meantime, three or four days' rain will reduce hundreds to starving in London. . . .

I know not where any personal eccentricity is so freely allowed, and no man gives himself any concern with it. An Englishman walks in a pouring rain, swinging his closed umbrella like a walking-stick; wears a wig, or a shawl, or a saddle, or stands on his head, and no remark is made. And as he has been doing this for several generations, it is now in the blood. . . .

To be king of their word is their pride. When they unmask cant, they say, ‘The English of this is,' etc.; and to give the lie is the extreme insult. The phrase of the lowest of the people is ‘honour-bright,' and their vulgar praise, ‘His word is as good as his bond.' . . .

The prestige of the English name warrants a certain confident bearing, which a Frenchman or Belgian could not carry. At all events, they feel themselves at liberty to assume the most extraordinary tone on the subject of English merits. An English lady on the Rhine hearing a German speaking of her party as foreigners, exclaimed, ‘No, we are not foreigners; we are English; it is you that are foreigners.' . . .

London is the epitome of our times, and the Rome of today. . . . England is tender-hearted. Rome was not. England is not so public in its bias; private life is its place of honour. Truth in private life, untruth in public, marks these home-loving men. Their political conduct is not decided by general views, but by internal intrigues and personal and family interest. They cannot readily see beyond England. . . . ‘English principles' mean a primary regard to the interests of property. . . . In England, the strong classes check the weaker. In the home population of near thirty millions, there are but one million voters. The Church punishes dissent, punishes education. Down to a late day, marriages performed by dissenters were illegal. A bitter class-legislation gives power to those who are rich enough to buy a law. The game laws are a proverb of oppression. Pauperism encrusts and clogs the state, and in hard times becomes hideous. In bad seasons, the porridge was diluted. . . .

It is a people of myriad personalities. Their many-headedness is owing to the advantageous position of the middle classes, who are always the source of letters and science. Hence the vast plenty of their aesthetic production. As they are many-headed, so they are many-nationed: their colonization annexes archipelagoes and continents, and their speech seems destined to be the universal language of man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson,
English Traits
(1856 and 1876)

RAIN

Sunday in London in the rain: the shops are shut, the streets are almost deserted; the aspect is that of an immense and a well-ordered cemetery. The few passers-by under their umbrellas, in the desert of squares and streets, have the look of uneasy spirits who have risen from their graves; it is appalling.

I had no conception of such a spectacle, which is said to be frequent in London. The rain is small, compact, pitiless; looking at it one can see no reason why it should not continue to the end of all things; one's feet churn water, there is water everywhere, filthy water impregnated with an odour of soot. A yellow, dense fog fills the air, sweeps down to the ground; at thirty paces a house, a steam-boat appear as spots upon blotting-paper. After an hour's walk in the Strand especially, and in the rest of the City, one has the spleen, one meditates suicide.

Hippolyte Taine (trans. W.F. Rae),
Notes on England
(1872)

GENTEEL ENGLAND

Once, on coming from the Continent, almost the first inscription I saw in my native English was this: ‘To let, a Genteel House, up this road.' And it struck me forcibly, for I had not come across the idea of gentility, among the upper limestones of the Alps, for seven months; nor do I think that the Continental nations in general
have
the idea. They would have advertised a ‘pretty' house, or a ‘large' one, or a ‘convenient' one; but they could not, by any use of the terms afforded by their several languages, have got at the English ‘genteel'. Consider, a little, all the meanness there is in that epithet, and then see, when next you cross the Channel, how scornful of it that Calais [cathedral] spire will look.

Of which spire the largeness and age are opposed exactly to the chief appearances of modern England, as one feels them on first returning to it; that marvellous smallness both of houses and scenery, so that a ploughman on the valley has his head on a level with the tops of all the hills in the neighbourhood; and a house is organised into complete establishment – parlour, kitchen, and all, with a knocker to its door, and a garret window to its roof, and a bow to its second storey – on a scale of 12 feet wide by 15 high, so that three such at least would go into the granary of an ordinary Swiss cottage; and also our serenity of perfection, our peace of conceit, everything being done that vulgar minds can conceive as wanting to be done; the spirit of well-principled housemaids everywhere, exerting itself for perpetual propriety and renovation, so that nothing is old, but only ‘old-fashioned,' and contemporary, as it were, in date and impressiveness only with last year's bonnets. . . . Then that spirit of trimness. The smooth paving stones; the scraped, hard, even, ruthless roads; the neat gates and plates, and essence of border and order, and spikiness and spruceness.

John Ruskin,
Modern Painters,
Vol. IV (1856)

PODSNAP AND THE CONSTITUTION

Hideous solidity was the characteristic of the Podsnap plate. Everything was made to look as heavy as it could, and to take up as much room as possible. Everything said boastfully, ‘Here you have as much of me in my ugliness as if I were only lead; but I am so many ounces of precious metal worth so much an ounce; – wouldn't you like to melt me down?' A corpulent straddling epergne, blotched all over as if it had broken out in an eruption rather than been ornamented, delivered this address from an unsightly silver platform in the centre of the table. Four silver wine-coolers, each furnished with four staring heads, each head obtrusively carrying a big silver ring in each of its ears, conveyed the sentiment up and down the table, and handed it on to the pot-bellied silver salt-cellars. All the big silver spoons and forks widened the mouths of the company expressly for the purpose of thrusting the sentiment down their throats with every morsel they ate.

The majority of the guests were like the plate, and included several heavy articles weighing ever so much. But there was a foreign gentleman among them; whom Mr Podsnap had invited after much debate with himself – believing the whole European continent to be in mortal alliance against the young person – and there was a droll disposition, not only on the part of Mr Podsnap, but of everybody else, to treat him as if he were a child who was hard of hearing.

As a delicate concession to this unfortunately-born foreigner, Mr Podsnap, in receiving him, had presented his wife as ‘Madame Podsnap'; also his daughter as ‘Mademoiselle Podsnap', with some inclination to add ‘ma fille', in which bold venture, however, he checked himself. The Veneerings being at that time the only other arrivals, he had added (in a condescendingly explanatory manner), ‘Monsieur Vey-nair-reeng', and had then subsided into English.

‘How Do You Like London?' Mr Podsnap now inquired from his station of host, as if he were administering something in the nature of a powder or potion to the deaf child; ‘London, Londres, London?'

The foreign gentleman admired it.

‘You find it Very Large?' said Mr Podsnap, spaciously.

The foreign gentleman found it very large.

‘And Very Rich?'

The foreign gentleman found it, without doubt, enormément riche.