Dickens's England (3 page)

‘Enormously Rich, We say,' returned Mr Podsnap, in a condescending manner. ‘Our adverbs do Not terminate in Mong, and We Pronounce the “ch” as if it were a “t” before it. We Say Ritch.'

‘Reetch,' remarked the foreign gentleman.

‘And Do You Find, Sir,' pursued Mr Podsnap, with dignity, ‘Many Evidences that Strike You, of our British Constitution in the Streets of the World's Metropolis, London, Londres, London?'

The foreign gentleman begged to be pardoned, but did not altogether understand.

‘The Constitution Britannique,' Mr Podsnap explained, as if he were teaching in an infant school. ‘We Say British, But You Say Britannique, You Know' (forgivingly, as if that were not his fault). ‘The Constitution, Sir.'

The foreign gentleman sais, ‘Mais, yees; I know eem.'

A youngish sallowish gentleman in spectacles, with a lumpy forehead, seated in a supplementary chair at a corner of the table, here caused a profound sensation by saying, in a raised voice, ‘
ESKER
', and then stopping dead.

‘Mais oui,' said the foreign gentleman, turning towards him. ‘Est-ce-que? Quoi donc?'

But the gentleman with the lumpy forehead having for the time delivered himself of all that he found behind his lumps, spake for the time no more.

‘I Was Inquiring,' said Mr Podsnap, resuming the thread of his discourse, ‘Whether You Have Observed in our Streets as We should say, Upon our Pavvy as You would say, any Tokens – '

The foreign gentleman with patient courtesy entreated pardon; ‘But what was tokenz?'

‘Marks,' said Mr Podsnap; ‘Signs, you know, Appearances – Traces.'

‘Ah! Of a Orse?' inquired the foreign gentleman.

‘We call it Horse,' said Mr Podsnap, with forbearance. ‘In England, Angleterr, England, We Aspirate the “H”, and We Say “Horse”. Only our Lower Classes Say “Orse”!'

‘Pardon,' said the foreign gentleman; ‘I am alwiz wrong!'

‘Our Language,' said Mr Podsnap, with a gracious consciousness of being always right, ‘is Difficult. Ours is a Copious Language, and Trying to Strangers. I will not Pursue my Question.'

But the lumpy gentleman, unwilling to give it up, again madly said, ‘
ESKER
', and again spake no more.

‘I merely referred,' Mr Podsnap explained, with a sense of meritorious proprietorship, ‘to Our Constitution, Sir. We Englishmen are Very Proud of our Constitution, Sir. It Was Bestowed Upon Us By Providence. No Other Country is so Favoured as This Country.'

‘And ozer countries? – ' the foreign gentleman was beginning, when Mr Podsnap put him right again.

‘We do not say Ozer; we say Other; the letters are “T” and “H”; you say Tay and Aish, You Know' (still with clemency). ‘The sound is “th” – “th”!'

‘And
other
countries,' said the foreign gentleman. ‘They do how?'

‘They do, Sir,' returned Mr Podsnap, gravely shaking his head; ‘they do – I am sorry to be obliged to say it –
as
they do.'

‘It was a little particular of Providence,' said the foreign gentleman, laughing; ‘for the frontier is not large.'

‘Undoubtedly,' assented Mr Podsnap; ‘But So it is. It was the Charter of the Land. This Island was Blest, Sir, to the Direct Exclusion of such Other Countries as – as there may happen to be. And if we were all Englishmen present, I would say,' added Mr Podsnap, looking round upon his compatriots, and sounding solemnly with his theme, ‘that there is in the Englishman a combination of qualities, a modesty, an independence, a responsibility, a repose, combined with an absence of everything calculated to call a blush into the cheek of a young person, which one would seek in vain among the Nations of the Earth.'

Having delivered this little summary, Mr Podsnap's face flushed as he thought of the remote possibility of its being at all qualified by any prejudiced citizen of any other country; and, with his favourite right-arm flourish, he put the rest of Europe and the whole of Asia, Africa and America nowhere.

Charles Dickens,
Our Mutual Friend
(1865)

FROM ‘MR MOLONEY'S ACCOUNT OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE'

[In mock Irish]

With ganial foire

Thransfuse me loyre,

Ye sacred nymphs of Pindus,

The whoile I sing

That wondthrous thing,

The Palace made o' windows! . . .

'Tis here that roams,

As well becomes

Her dignitee and stations,

VICTORIA
Great,

And houlds in state

The Congress of the Nations.

Her subjects pours

From distant shores,

Her Injians and Canajians;

And also we,

Her kingdoms three,

Attind with our allagiance.

Here come likewise

Her bould allies,

Both Asian and Europian;

From East and West

They send their best

To fill her Coornucopean. . . .

There's holy saints

And window paints,

By Maydiayval Pugin;

Alhamborough Jones

Did paint the tones

Of yellow and gambouge in. . . .

There's Statues bright

Of marble white,

Of silver, and of copper;

And some in zinc,

And some, I think,

That isn't over proper.

There's staym Ingynes,

That stands in lines,

Enormous and amazing,

That squeal and snort

Like whales in sport,

Or elephants a-grazing. . . .

Look, here's a fan

From far Japan,

A sabre from Damasco;

There's shawls ye get

From far Thibet,

And cotton prints from Glasgow. . . .

There's granite flints

That's quite imminse,

There's sacks of coals and fuels,

There's swords and guns,

And soap in tuns,

And Ginger-bread and Jewels.

There's taypots there,

And cannons rare;

There's coffins filled with roses;

There's canvass tints,

Teeth insthrumints,

And shuits of clothes by Moses. . . .

So let us raise

VICTORIA'S
praise,

And
ALBERT'S
proud condition,

That takes his ayse

As he surveys

This Cristial Exhibition.

William Makepeace Thackeray,
Punch
(1851)

YOUR TRUE RELIGION

My good Yorkshire friends, you asked me down here [Bradford] among your hills that I might talk to you about this Exchange you are going to build; but, earnestly and seriously asking you to pardon me, I am going to do nothing of the kind. I cannot talk, or at least can say very little, about this same Exchange. I must talk of quite other things . . .

Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste . . .

Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine somewhat. Taste is not only a part and an index of morality – it is the
ONLY
morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, ‘What do you like?' Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are. . . .

I notice that among all the new buildings which cover your once wild hills, churches and schools are mixed in due, that is to say, in large proportion, with your mills and mansions; and I notice also that the churches and schools are almost always Gothic, and the mansions and mills are never Gothic. May I ask the meaning of this? . . . Am I to understand that you are thinking of changing your architecture back to Gothic; and that you treat your churches experimentally, because it does not matter what mistakes you make in a church? Or am I to understand that you consider Gothic a pre-eminently sacred and beautiful mode of building, which you think, like the fine frankincense, should be mixed for the tabernacle only, and reserved for your religious services? For if this be the feeling, though it may seem at first as if it were graceful and reverent, at the root of the matter, it signifies neither more nor less than that you have separated your religion from your life. . . .

I hope, now, that there is no risk of your misunderstanding me when I come to the gist of what I want to say tonight – when I repeat, that every great national architecture has been the result and exponent of a great national religion. . . .

You know we are speaking always of the real, active, continual national worship; that by which men act, while they live; not that which they talk of, when they die. Now, we have, indeed, a nominal religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our property and six-sevenths of our time. And we dispute a great deal about the nominal religion: but we are all unanimous about this practical one; of which I think that you will admit that the ruling goddess may be best generally described as the ‘Goddess of Getting-On', or ‘Britannia of the Market'. . . . And all your great architectural works are, of course, built to her. It is long since you built a great cathedral; and how you would laugh at me if I proposed building a cathedral on the top of one of those hills of yours, to make it an Acropolis! But your railroad mounds, vaster than the walls of Babylon; your railroad stations, vaster than the temple of Ephesus, and innumerable; your chimneys, how much more mighty and costly than cathedral spires! your harbour piers; your warehouses; your exchanges! – all these are built to your great Goddess of ‘Getting-On'; and she has formed, and will continue to form, your architecture, as long as you worship her; and it is quite vain to ask me to tell you how to build to
her
; you know far better than I. . . .

Examine . . . your own ideal of the state of national life which this Goddess is to evoke and maintain. . . . Your ideal of human life then is, I think, that it should be passed in a pleasant undulating world, with iron and coal everywhere underneath it. On each pleasant bank of this world is to be a beautiful mansion, with two wings; and stables, and coach-houses; a moderately-sized park; a large garden and hot-houses; and pleasant carriage drives through the shrubberies. In this mansion are to live the favoured votaries of the Goddess: the English gentleman, with his gracious wife, and his beautiful family; always able to have the boudoir and the jewels for the wife, and the beautiful ball dresses for the daughters, and hunters for the sons, and a shooting in the Highlands for himself. At the bottom of the bank is to be the mill; not less than a quarter of a mile long with one steam engine at each end, and two in the middle, and a chimney three hundred feet high. In this mill are to be in constant employment from eight hundred to a thousand workers, who never drink, never strike, always go to church on Sunday, and always express themselves in respectful language. . . .

Observe, while to one family this deity is indeed the Goddess of Getting-On, to a thousand families she is the Goddess of not Getting On. ‘Nay,' you say, ‘they have all their chance.'

John Ruskin,
The Crown of Wild Olive
(1864, 1873)

‘EACH FOR HIMSELF IS STILL THE RULE'

Each for himself is still the rule,

We learn it when we go to school –

The devil take the hindmost, o!

And when the schoolboys grow to men,

In life they learn it o'er again –

The devil take the hindmost, o!

For in the church, and at the bar,

On 'Change, at court, where'er they are,

The devil take the hindmost, o!

Husband for husband, wife for wife,

Are careful that in married life

The devil take the hindmost, o!

From youth to age, whate'er the game,

The unvarying practice is the same –

The devil take the hindmost, o!

And after death, we do not know,

But scarce can doubt, where'er we go,

The devil take the hindmost, o!

Tol rol de rol, tol rol de ro,

The devil take the hindmost, o!

Arthur Hugh Clough (1852)

OUTSIDE NEWGATE GAOL

In the sixties hangings were done in public [until 1868], and anything of an unusual kind attracted large parties from the West End; this was as recognised a custom as the more modern fashion of making up a party to go to the Boat Race, or to share a
coupé
on a long railway journey.

And so it came about that the phenomenal sight of the execution of the seven Flowery Land pirates in '64 created, in morbid circles, a stir rarely equalled before or since. . . . The prices paid were enormous, varying from twenty to fifty guineas a window, in accordance with the superiority of the perspective from ‘find to finish' [a fox-hunting phrase]. . . .

The scene on a night preceding a public execution afforded a study of the dark side of nature not to be obtained under any other circumstances.

Here was to be seen the lowest scum of London densely packed together as far as the eye could reach, and estimated by ‘The Times' at not less than 200,000. Across the entire front of Newgate heavy barricades of stout timber traversed the streets in every direction, created as a precaution against the pressure of the crowd, but which answered a purpose not wholly anticipated by the authorities.

As the crowd increased, so wholesale highway robberies were of more frequent occurrence; and victims in the hands of some two or three desperate ruffians were as far from help as though divided by a continent from the battalions of police surrounding the scaffold.

The scene that met one's view on pulling up the windows and looking out on the black night and its still blacker accompaniments baffles description. A surging mass, with here and there a flickering torch, rolled and roared before one; above this weird scene arose the voices of men and women shouting, singing, blaspheming and, as the night advanced and the liquid gained firmer mastery, it seemed as if hell had delivered up its victims. . . . It was difficult to believe one was in the centre of a civilised capital that vaunted its religion and yet meted out justice in such a form.