JOHN PODSNAP is a minor character in Dickens’s last completed novel,“Our Mutual Friend”, but he is impossible to forget. He is convinced that England is the best of all possible countries and the rest of the world is nothing more than “a mistake”. His invariable verdict on the manners and morals of other countries is “Not English”, delivered “with a flourish of the arm and a flush of the face”. Encountering a Frenchman at dinner, he gives the “unfortunately born foreigner” a lecture on “le constitution Britannique”. “We Englishmen are very proud of our constitution…it was bestowed upon us by providence. No other country is so favoured as this country.”
The word Podsnappery has since found its way into the Oxford English Dictionary. But as E.P. Thompson, a Marxist historian, pointed out, many English people suffer from the opposite deformation: reverse Podsnappery. This proceeds from the premise that other countries are superior in every way (particularly when it comes...Continue reading
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