‘Anglo-Parisian Salutations, or Practice par Excel...
‘Anglo-Parisian Salutations, or Practice par Excellence!’ (1822) by George Cruikshank (1792-1878) shows an Englishman meeting a Frenchman on the Rue de Bouloi in Paris, and attempting some clumsy French chit-chat. ‘Commong porly wous, Munseer?’ he begins. ‘O — oui — il est un tres belle jour!’ Using W for V was a common English affectation of the time, as demonstrated by Dickens’s own Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers (1836). A theatre poster behind advertises a production entitled ‘Les Anglois pour Rire,’ another ‘John Bull en Paris’ at the Opéra Comique. Writing from Paris in July 1850, Dickens mentioned to William Henry Wills that “I saw a certain ‘Lord Spleen’ mentioned in a playbill yesterday, and will look after that distinguished English nobleman to-night, if possible.”
Part 1 of 2
TO the honour of our modern English authors be it spoken, they have been zealous to avoid such ridiculous mistakes. It is true that the harmless old legends respecting Foreigners — that nine-tenths of them are Frenchmen; that all are of very slender proportions in figure; that their staple diet is frogs; and that, despite Alison’s and every other History of Europe they very much prefer to dance than to fight;* together with other popular delusions — still linger in the minds of some of our bold peasantry and milder cockneys; but it is to be hoped, after many years of peace and better sense, that we may now claim for the majority of even an under-educated British public, a more correct knowledge of the personnel and manners of our Continental neighbours, than our Continental neighbours manifestly have of us.*
The very foible of Lord Pudding himself* — that of being a travelling Englishman — would defend him from such blunders as the literary Frankenstein who gave life to the monster, has fallen into.* Travelling Englishmen are common abroad, who speak foreign languages, and understand foreign customs, extremely well.
* A History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution to the Restoration of the Bourbons, by Sir Archibald Alison, 1st Baronet (1792–1867), published in ten volumes between 1833 and 1843. It was proverbial for the author’s industry, accuracy and verbosity.
* Dickens’s opinion, that the English were guilty of prejudice but our neighbours were no better, was shared by Elizabeth Gaskell. “We have tortured Jews” she admitted ruefully in the August 1855 edition of Household Words; “we have burnt Catholics and Protestants, to say nothing of a few witches and wizards. We have satirised Puritans, and we have dressed up Guys. But, after all, I do not think we have been so bad as our Continental friends.”
* Lord Pudding was padded, garishly dressed, a clumsy dancer and a clumsier lover. He also swore profusely, a habit of an earlier generation of Englishmen which had imprinted itself on native peoples from Austria to Australia. On a visit to Anjouan (then the island of Johanna) in the Indian Ocean, Scottish naval officer Basil Hall (1788-1844) recorded the English picked up by one of the islanders, a kind of cross between Mr Mantalini and Mr Jingle. ‘How do you do, sir? Very glad see you. D—n your eyes! Johanna man like English very much. God d—n! That very good, eh? Devilish hot, sir! What news? Hope your ship stay too long while — very. D—n my eye! Very fine day.’
Victor Frankenstein is the title character in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), an Italian-Swiss pseudo-scientific dabbler who confected a nameless, eight-foot-tall artificial human of grotesque features. Lord Pudding was not the only catalyst for Dickens’s article, however. He mentions in passing The Decline of England (1850) by Frenchman A. A. Ledru-Rollin, which had painted an unflattering picture of the Empire and predicted its imminent collapse with a little too much relish. The previous July, Dickens — recently returned from one of his frequent visits to Paris — had published an indignant retort from Christopher Shrimble (W. H. Wills).
Précis
Prompted by a play staged in Vienna in 1850, Charles Dickens took exception to the portrayal of Englishmen by Continental men of letters. He admitted that the English cherished their own European stereotypes, but insisted that there were nonetheless many well-travelled Englishmen who showed a better understanding of foreign ways than these Continental neighbours did. (54 / 60 words)
Part Two
An artist’s impression by architect Alexander Kolb (1819-1887) of the train shed at St Petersburg, at that time the capital of the Russian Empire, drawn in 1844. The Nikolaevsky Line to Moscow was opened in 1851, a year after Dickens published his article urging Englishmen to travel abroad and engender mutual sympathy where it had been lacking before. It was isolation by land or sea, he believed, that tended to encourage grating caricatures like Lord Pudding to spring up and endure, and political figures could not be trusted to smooth them away: on the contrary, they always managed to manipulate group identity for their own ends.
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 (2).
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. (59 / 60 words)
