Reflections and Comments 1865-1895Godkin, Edwin Lawrence
General
Reflections and Comments 1865-1895
Godkin, Edwin Lawrence
Essays
Then there is the Dundreary Englishman, first-cousin or lineal
descendant of the Englishman so dear to the French imagination.
Dundreary really represents, as we know very well, when we think
about it, a past type of swell as extinct as the dodo. It is not
common any longer for English swells to change all their rs to ws,
and to spice their sentences with "aw-aws." We have numbers of them
over here every year, but we do not hear them talk nowadays the once
familiar Dundreary language. Yet there is hardly a newspaper in the
United States whose funny man does not assume for the benefit of his
readers that Dundreary is alive, and every now and then reproduce
him with gusto. It is not in _Punch_ that we find Dundreary, but in
the funny department of the Oshkosh _Monitor_ and the "All Sorts"
column of the Bungtown _Clarion_. Even _Puck_ contributes to
perpetuate the belief in the continued existence of Dundreary by
devoting a column a week to observations on American society in the
Dundreary dialect, which thirty years ago might have been decidedly
funny.
_Punch_ still has John Bull as a national type; but it shows great
reserve in the use of him, and now continually resorts to Britannia
as a substitute. Is not this because our old friend John is now
only a survival, a tradition of the past? The bluff, stout, honest,
red-faced, irascible rural person--of whom the photographs of John
Bright remind us--has really been supplanted by a more modern,
thinner, nervous, intellectual, astute type. For English use the
Yankee type of Uncle Sam still seems to represent America, although
it belongs to the past as much as slavery or the stage-coach. He
would be a bold man who should undertake to say what the national
type is now; but it is safe to say that it is not a long, thin, cute
Yankee, dressed in a swallow-tailed coat with brass buttons,
whittling a stick, and interlarding his conversation with "I swan!"
and "I calc'late." If Mr. Lowell were writing the "Biglow Papers"
now, would "Uncle S." serve his purpose as he did during the war? By
a merciful dispensation of Providence, however, Brother Jonathan and
Uncle Sam still live on in the imaginations of large masses of
conservative Englishmen, and no doubt enable many a Tory to people
the United States with a race as alien from that which actually
inhabits it as Zulus would be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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