Exit Lord Pudding

THERE are many of our travellers whom we should be very glad to improve:* and thanks to railways, and to our possession of some — though not very much — of the wealth which the foreign dramatic and fictionist artists so liberally attribute to us, we are rapidly polishing off the rust of national prejudice, and ignorance of our brethren abroad. Should an English author or actor be guilty of such laughable mistakes about foreigners as those we have pointed out, woe unutterable would alight on his ignorant head.

Every sort of attraction which brings people of different nations, and even of different counties, together — whether it be a German wool fair, a music meeting, or a Swiss shooting-match — smooths away the acerbities of caste, and strengthens the sympathies of individuals.* Let us, therefore, hope that the myriads of exotics which will be attracted next year to the Great Industrial Conservatory in Hyde Park,* will receive new vigour and fresh intelligence from their temporary transplantation; that they will learn that Englishmen and English women are not quite the monstrosities they at present appear to believe them.

From ‘Foreigners’ Portraits of Englishmen’ (September 21, 1850), in ‘Household Words’ Vol. 1 No. 26, pp. 601-604, edited by Charles Dickens (1812-1870). The essay was co-authored by Charles Dickens, William Henry Wills (1810-1880) and Grenville Murray (1824-1881). Further information from ‘Insularities’ (January 19, 1856), in ‘Household Words’ Vol. 13 No. 304, pp. 1-24, by Dickens.

One celebrated example described in Dickens’s travelogue Pictures from Italy was Mr Davis and his party, whom Dickens kept bumping into in Rome; he delightedly catalogued their eccentricities and minor catastrophes, and regretted that he never actually spoke to them. Another was a gentleman who was at pains to establish whether a Holy Week display showing Christ and his Apostles at the Last Supper included a mustard pot on the table.

* The personal touch, man to man, was key to Dickens’s remedy for prejudice; he would have had no patience with campaigns waged by experts and politicians or their definitions of ‘identity.’ In a later article on English ‘Insularities,’ he wrote that we owed our national bad habits “in a great degree to our insular [i.e. island] position, and in a small degree to the facility with which we have permitted electioneering lords and gentlemen to pretend to think for us, and to represent our weaknesses to us as our strength.”

* The Great Exhibition of 1851, at the Crystal Palace in London. Dickens would later express irritation at the hype surrounding it, but mostly in jest. See posts tagged Great Exhibition of 1851.

Précis
Of course, not all Englishmen who ventured abroad were a credit to their homeland, Dickens conceded; but the opportunities afforded by railways meant that this problem was already being remedied. A further boost to mutual understanding was promised by the forthcoming Great Exhibition of 1851, as anything which brought individuals together over a common interest tended to foster human sympathy.
Questions for Critics

1. What are the authors aiming to achieve in writing this?

2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the authors communicate their ideas more effectively?

3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?

Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.

Jigsaws

Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.

English people often went abroad. Most were credit to their country.

See if you can include one or more of these words in your answer.

ISome. IIReflect. IIIVisit.

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