Having received a great deal of obloquy for dragging monarchs, princes,
and the respected nobility into the Snob category, I trust to please
everybody in the present chapter, by stating my firm opinion that it
is among the RESPECTABLE classes of this vast and happy empire that the
greatest profusion of Snobs is to be found. I pace down my beloved Baker
Street, (I am engaged on a life of Baker, founder of this celebrated
street,) I walk in Harley Street (where every other house has a
hatchment), Wimpole Street, that is as cheerful as the Catacombs--a
dingy Mausoleum of the genteel:--I rove round Regent's Park, where the
plaster is patching off the house walls; where Methodist preachers are
holding forth to three little children in the green inclosures, and
puffy valetudinarians are cantering in the solitary mud:--I thread the
doubtful ZIG-ZAGS of May Fair, where Mrs. Kitty Lorimer's Brougham may
be seen drawn up next door to old Lady Lollipop's belozenged family
coach;--I roam through Belgravia, that pale and polite district, where
all the inhabitants look prim and correct, and the mansions are painted
a faint whity-brown: I lose myself in the new squares and terraces of
the brilliant bran-new Bayswater-and-Tyburn-Junction line; and in one
and all of these districts the same truth comes across me. I stop before
any house at hazard, and say, 'O house, you are inhabited--O knocker,
you are knocked at--O undressed flunkey, sunning your lazy calves as
you lean against the iron railings, you are paid--by Snobs.' It is
a tremendous thought that; and it is almost sufficient to drive a
benevolent mind to madness to think that perhaps there is not one in
ten of those houses where the 'Peerage' does not lie on the drawing-room
table. Considering the harm that foolish lying book does, I would have
all the copies of it burned, as the barber burned all Quixote's books of
humbugging chivalry.
Look at this grand house in the middle of the square. The Earl of
Loughcorrib lives there: he has fifty thousand a year. A DEJEUNER
DANSANT given at his house last week cost, who knows how much? The
mere flowers for the room and bouquets for the ladies cost four hundred
pounds. That man in drab trousers, coming crying down the stops, is a
dun: Lord Loughcorrib has ruined him, and won't see him: that is his
lordship peeping through the blind of his study at him now. Go thy ways,
Loughcorrib, thou art a Snob, a heartless pretender, a hypocrite of
hospitality; a rogue who passes forged notes upon society;--but I am
growing too eloquent.
You see that nice house, No. 23, where a butcher's boy is ringing the
area-bell. He has three muttonchops in his tray. They are for the dinner
of a very different and very respectable family; for Lady Susan Scraper,
and her daughters, Miss Scraper and Miss Emily Scraper. The domestics,
luckily for them, are on board wages--two huge footmen in light blue and
canary, a fat steady coachman who is a Methodist, and a butler who
would never have stayed in the family but that he was orderly to General
Scraper when the General distinguished himself at Walcheren. His widow
sent his portrait to the United Service Club, and it is hung up in
one of the back dressing-closets there. He is represented at a parlour
window with red curtains; in the distance is a whirlwind, in which
cannon are firing off; and he is pointing to a chart, on which are
written the words 'Walcheren, Tobago.'
Lady Susan is, as everybody knows by referring to the 'British Bible,' a
daughter of the great and good Earl Bagwig before mentioned. She thinks
everything belonging to her the greatest and best in the world. The
first of men naturally are the Buckrams, her own race: then follow in
rank the Scrapers. The General was the greatest general: his eldest son,
Scraper Buckram Scraper, is at present the greatest and best; his second
son the next greatest and best; and herself the paragon of women.
Indeed, she is a most respectable and honourable lady. She goes to
church of course: she would fancy the Church in danger if she did not.
She subscribes to Church and parish charities; and is a directress
of meritorious charitable institutions--of Queen Charlotte's Lying-in
Hospital, the Washerwomen's Asylum, the British Drummers' Daughters'
Home, &c.. She is a model of a matron.
The tradesman never lived who could say that he was not paid on
the quarter-day. The beggars of her neighbourhood avoid her like a
pestilence; for while she walks out, protected by John, that domestic
has always two or three mendicity tickets ready for deserving objects.
Ten guineas a year will pay all her charities. There is no respectable
lady in all London who gets her name more often printed for such a sum
of money.
Those three mutton-chops which you see entering at the kitchen-door will
be served on the family-plate at seven o'clock this evening, the huge
footman being present, and the butler in black, and the crest and
coat-of-arms of the Scrapers blazing everywhere. I pity Miss Emily
Scraper--she is still young--young and hungry. Is it a fact that she
spends her pocket-money in buns? Malicious tongues say so; but she has
very little to spare for buns, the poor little hungry soul! For the
fact is, that when the footmen, and the ladies' maids, and the fat
coach-horses, which are jobbed, and the six dinner-parties in the
season, and the two great solemn evening-parties, and the rent of the
big house, and the journey to an English or foreign watering-place for
the autumn, are paid, my lady's income has dwindled away to a very small
sum, and she is as poor as you or I.
You would not think it when you saw her big carriage rattling up to the
drawing-room, and caught a glimpse of her plumes, lappets, and diamonds,
waving over her ladyship's sandy hair and majestical hooked nose;--you
would not think it when you hear 'Lady Susan Scraper's carriage' bawled
out at midnight so as to disturb all Belgravia:--you would not think it
when she comes rustling into church, the obsequious John behind with the
bag of Prayer-books. Is it possible, you would say, that so grand and
awful a personage as that can be hard-up for money? Alas! So it is.
She never heard such a word as Snob, I will engage, in this wicked and
vulgar world. And, O stars and garters! how she would start if she heard
that she--she, as solemn as Minerva--she, as chaste as Diana (without
that heathen goddess's unladylike propensity for field-sports)--that she
too was a Snob!
A Snob she is, as long as she sets that prodigious value upon herself,
upon her name, upon her outward appearance, and indulges in that
intolerable pomposity; as long as she goes parading abroad, like
Solomon in all his glory; as long as she goes to bed--as I believe she
does--with a turban and a bird of paradise in it, and a court train
to her night-gown; as long as she is so insufferably virtuous and
condescending; as long as she does not cut at least one of those footmen
down into mutton-chops for the benefit of the young ladies.
I had my notions of her from my old schoolfellow,--her son Sydney
Scraper--a Chancery barrister without any practice--the most placid,
polite, and genteel of Snobs, who never exceeded his allowance of two
hundred a year, and who may be seen any evening at the 'Oxford and
Cambridge Club,' simpering over the QUARTERLY REVIEW, in the blameless
enjoyment of his half-pint of port.