Podsnappery
Sol Eytinge
Wood engraving
7.5 cm wide by 10 cm high
Illustration for chapter 11 of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend in the Lee & Shepard (Boston), and Charles T. Dillingham (New York) 1870 Illustrated Household Edition.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
To exemplify "Podsnappery," the title of the eleventh chapter, American illustrator Eytinge has conflated Dickens's initial description of Mr. Podsnap and his characteristically dismissive gesture and the later description of Miss Podsnap. Standing beside his ornate Victorian fireplace and clad in respectable pantaloons, tailcoat and white vest with a studded shirt-front and starched collar, Podsnap is the quintessential mid-nineteenth-century bourgeois.
Mr. Podsnap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him (and consequently sheer away) with those words and a flushed face. For they affronted him. [79-80]
Dickens utilizes Mr. Podsnap's shirt-collar to indicate his narrow, restricted perspective and the "close bounds" of middle-class propriety in which he lives, but the text does not specify any of the details with which Eytinge has described the family's drawing-room. The illustrator has surrealistically incorporated an image of Miss Podsnap as an extension of her father's narrow world-view. She is as characteristic of her father as the creaking of Mr. Podsnap's boots:
And this young rocking-horse was being trained in her mother's art of prancing in a stately manner without ever getting on. But the high parental action was not yet imparted to her, and in truth she was but an under-sized damsel, with high shoulders, low spirits, chilled elbows, and a rasped surface of nose, who seemed to take occasional frosty peeps out of childhood into womanhood . . . . [80]
Finally, Eytinge conceives of Miss Podsnap in her pose and juxtaposition to the painting as being as much a demonstration of Podsnap's taste, style, and narrow-minded respectability as the landscape (presumably, given Mr. Podsnap's xenophobic dislike of all things "Not English," by an English landscape painter such as John Constable) hanging above his daughter's head.
Last modified 27 October 2010