the gentility-monger

• Posted by mgr on July 25th, 2007 filed in Dandy-Typen, KULTURELLES, Zeitdokumente
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Eigentlich kein Dandy, sondern ein Snob, soll der gentility-monger der Vollständigkeit und der Abgrenzung halber, ebenfalls aufgezeigt werden:

The GENTILITY-MONGERS are positively noxious to society, as well particular as general. There is a twofold or threefold iniquity in their goings-on; they sin against society, their families, and themselves; the whole business of their lives is a perversion of the text of Scripture, which commandeth us, “in whatever station we are, therewith to be content.”

The gentility-monger is a family man, having a house somewhere in Marylebone, or Pancras parish. He is sometimes a man of independent fortune–how acquired, nobody knows; that is his secret, his mystery. He will let no one suppose that he has ever been in trade; because, when a man intends gentility-mongering, it must never be known that he has formerly carried on the tailoring, or the shipping, or the cheese-mongering, or the fish-mongering, or any other mongering than the gentility-mongering. His house is very stylishly furnished; that is to say, as unlike the house of a man of fashion as possible–the latter having only things the best of their kind, and for use; the former displaying every variety of extravagant gimcrackery, to impress you with a profound idea of combined wealth and taste, but which, to an educated eye and mind only, conveys a lively idea of ostentation. When you call upon a gentility-monger, a broad-shouldered, coarse, ungentlemanlike footman, in Aurora plushes, ushers you to a drawing-room, where, on tables round, and square, and hexagonal, are set forth jars, porcelain, china, and delft; shells, spars; stuffed parrots under bell-glasses; corals, minerals, and an infinity of trumpery, among which albums, great, small, and intermediate, must by no means be forgotten.

The room is papered with some splendacious pattern in blue and gold; a chandelier of imposing gingerbread depends from the richly ornamented ceiling; every variety of ottoman, lounger, settee, is scattered about, so that to get a chair involves the right-of-search question; the bell-pulls are painted in Poonah; there is a Brussels carpet of flaming colours, curtains with massive fringes, bad pictures in gorgeous frames; prints, after Ross, of her Majesty and Prince Albert, of course; and mezzotints of the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel, for whom the gentility-monger has a profound respect, and of whom he talks with a familiarity showing that it is not his fault, at least, if these exalted personages do not admit him to the honour of their acquaintance. (…)

Hospitality never enters into the composition of a gentility-monger: he gives a dinner, wine, and a shake of the hand, but does not know what the word welcome means: he says, now and then, to his wife “My dear, I think we must give a dinner;” a dinner is accordingly determined on, cards issued three weeks in advance, that you may be premeditatedly dull; the dinner is gorgeous to repletion, that conversation may be kept as stagnant as possible. Of those happy surprize invitations–those unexpected extemporaneous dinners, that as they come without thinking or expectation, so go off with eclat, and leave behind the memory of a cheerful evening–he has no idea; a man of fashion, whose place is fixed, and who has only himself to please, will ask you to a slice of crimped cod and a hash of mutton, without ceremony; and when he puts a cool bottle on the table, after a dinner that he and his friend have really enjoyed, will never so much as apologize with, “my dear sir, I fear you have had a wretched dinner,” or “I wish I had known: I should have had something better.” This affected depreciation of his hospitality he leaves to the gentility-monger, who will insist on cramming you with fish, flesh, and fowls, till you are like to burst; and then, by way of apology, get his guests to pay the reckoning in plethoric laudation of his mountains of victual.

If you wait in the drawing-room, kicking your heels for an hour after the appointed time, although you arrived to a minute, as every Christian does, you may be sure that somebody who patronizes the gentility-monger, probably the Honourable Mr Sniftky, is expected, and has not come. It is vain for you to attempt to talk to your host, hostess, or miss, who are absorbed, body and soul, in expectation of Honourable Sniftky; the propriety-faced people in the yellow waistcoats attitudinize in groups about the room, putting one pump out, drawing the other in, inserting the thumb gracefully in the arm-hole of the yellow waistcoats, and talking icicles; the young fellows play with a sprig of lily-of-the-valley in a button-hole–admire a flowing portrait of miss, asking one another if it is not very like–or hang over the back of a chair of one of the turbaned ladies, who gives good evening parties; the host receives a great many compliments upon one thing and another, from some of the professed diners-out, who take every opportunity of paying for their dinner beforehand; every body freezes with the chilling sensation of dinner deferred, and “curses, not loud but deep,” are imprecated on the Honourable Sniftky. At last, a prolonged rat-tat-tat announces the arrival of the noble beast, the lion of the evening; the Honourable Sniftky, who is a junior clerk in the Foreign Office, is announced by the footman out of livery, (for the day,) and announces himself a minute after: he comes in a long-tailed coat and boots, to show his contempt for his entertainers, and mouths a sort of apology for keeping his betters waiting, which is received by the gentility-monger, his lady, and miss, with nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles of unqualified admiration and respect. (…)

The whole art of the gentility-mongers of all sorts in London, and a fortiori of their wives and families, is to lay a tax upon social intercourse as nearly as possible amounting to a prohibition; their dinners are criminally wasteful, and sinfully extravagant to this end; to this end they insist on making price the test of what they are pleased to consider select society in their own sets, and they consequently cannot have a dance without guinea tickets nor a pic-nic without dozens of champagne. This shows their native ignorance and vulgarity more than enough; genteel people go upon a plan directly contrary, not merely enjoying themselves, but enjoying themselves without extravagance or waste: in this respect the gentility-mongers would do well to imitate people of fashion.

The exertions a gentility-monger will make, to rub his skirts against people above him; the humiliations, mortifications, snubbing, he will submit to, are almost incredible. One would hardly believe that a retired tradesman, of immense wealth, and enjoying all the respect that immense wealth will secure, should actually offer large sums of money to a lady of fashion, as an inducement to procure for him cards of invitation to her set, which he stated was the great object of his existence. Instead of being indignant at his presumption, the lady in question, pitying the poor man’s folly, attempted to reason with him, assuring him with great truth that whatever might be his wealth, his power or desire of pleasing, he would be rendered unhappy and ridiculous, by the mere dint of pretension to a circle to which he had no legitimate claim, and advising him, as a friend, to attempt some more laudable and satisfactory ambition.

All this good advice was, however, thrown away; our gentility-monger persevered, contriving somehow to gain a passport to some of the outer circles of fashionable life; was ridiculed, laughed at, and honoured with the soubriquet (he was a pianoforte maker) of the Semi-Grand!

We know another instance, where two young men, engaged in trade in the city, took a splendid mansion at the West End, furnished it sumptuously, got some desperate knight or baronet’s widow to give parties at their house, inviting whomsoever she thought proper, at their joint expense. It is unnecessary to say, the poor fellows succeeded in getting into good society, not indeed in the Court Circular, but in the–Gazette.

There is another class of gentility-mongers more to be pitied than the last; those, namely, who are endeavouring to “make a connexion,” as the phrase is, by which they may gain advancement in their professions, and are continually on the look-out for introductions to persons of quality, their hangers-on and dependents. There is too much of this sort of thing among medical men in London, the family nature of whose profession renders connexion, private partiality, and personal favour, more essential to them than to others. The lawyer, for example, need not be a gentility-monger; he has only to get round attorneys, for the opportunity to show what he can do, when he has done this, in which a little toadying, “on the sly,” is necessary–all the rest is easy. The court and the public are his judges; his powers are at once appreciable, his talent can be calculated, like the money in his pocket; he can now go on straight forward, without valuing the individual preference or aversion of any body.

But a profession where men make way through the whisperings of women, and an inexhaustible variety of sotto voce contrivances, must needs have a tendency to create a subserviency of spirit and of manner, which naturally directs itself into gentility-mongering: where realities, such as medical experience, reading, and skill, are remotely, or not at all, appreciable, we must take up with appearances; and of all appearances, the appearance of proximity to people of fashion is the most taking and seductive to people not of fashion. It is for this reason that a rising physician, if he happen to have a lord upon his sick or visiting list, never has done telling his plebeian patients the particulars of his noble case, which they swallow like almond milk, finding it an excellent placebo.

Quelle: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: THE WORLD OF LONDON. SECOND SERIES. PART III. THE ARISTOCRACIES OF LONDON LIFE. OF GENTILITY-MONGERING. No. CCCXXIX. March, 1843, Vol. LIII.

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