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.
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.