ABSTRACT
While Gaffer belongs to the murky depths the Veneerings, who throw a banquet in the second chapter, are all surface. They are the nouveaux riches, products of the system of capital investment and ‘traffic in Shares’ (159), set in a terrain of ‘high varnish and polish’, surrounded by everything ‘bran-new’, house, friends, a plethora of material possessions, even a ‘bran-new baby’ (48). Yet the signs of atrophy already show in the glittering façade, which everywhere exudes ‘a fatal freshness’ (50). The gloomy butler summons the party to table as with a prophecy of doom – ‘Come down and be poisoned, ye unhappy children of men!’ (51). This is a love-less gathering. The ageing Lady Tippins flirts with many, attracts none, a gruesome parody of the femme fatale. Boots and Brewer, who have no opinions of their own but parrot the
loudest around them, exemplify a suppression of intelligence and personality, their names equating them with the lines they are in. Similarly present are ‘a Member, an Engineer, a Payer-off of the national Debt, a Poem on Shakespeare, a Grievance, and a Public Office’ (49). To Twemlow, the minor aristocrat, not even function but virtual anonymity attaches, for he is uncertain whether he is Veneering’s ‘oldest friend, or newest friend’, and is mistaken by one delayed guest for the host himself. This late entrant is Podsnap, apogee of commerce and the risen middle class, an archetype of Arnoldian ‘Philistinism’, manifest in him above all as myopic respectability, which over-particularly reduces his daughter Georgiana, ‘the young person’ to whose cheek no blush must be brought, to a nervous wreck, and as a mindless monoculturalism, which dismisses the manners and customs of other countries, everything ‘Not English’, out of hand, or rather with ‘a flourish of the arm’ (174-5). The company, which covers a good cross-section of the well-born and the well-to-do, is neither cohesive circle nor set of rounded individuals, but an unstable mix of grist to the mills of Veneering’s ostentation and ambitions, which is ground to some advantage later when everyone dashes around getting him elected to the parliamentary seat of PocketBreaches. Rotten politics is also in view.
