The pervasiveness of English 'Podsnappery'.

 

As I write this, it's absolutely freezing outside. I can't believe that anybody would choose to sleep outside on a night like this if they had other options. You're literally putting your life at risk of dying of hypothermia.

 Some fools like  Cruella Braverman, the former Tory British Home Secretary, would have us believe that being homeless is a lifestyle choice. It might be for the odd individual, but make no mistake, homelessness can happen to anybody.

 I think many of us in Britain could learn a great deal about British society from reading the novels of Charles Dickens. When Dickens wrote 'Our Mutual Friend' during 1864-5, starvation, want and neglect, claimed more lives over the course of any given year, than the later Jack the Ripper Whitechapel murders did, over a period of three years. It wasn't unusual to find people dead in the streets of London.

 The theme of food and hunger pervades throughout much of Victorian literature. While half the Victorian population subsisted on almost nothing, the other half, as V.S. Pritchett noted, was "disgustedly overfed." The Victorian upper classes, enjoyed the luxury of eating fifteen-dish meals. The wealthiest of Victorians often believed that the poor had only themselves to blame for their pitiful existence and shouldn't be helped or they were indifferent.

 In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens satirizes the English middle-classes through the character of John Podsnap, a rich, pompous, self-satisfied complacent upper-class Englishman. 'Podsnappery' has come to symbolise smugness and complacency and a refusal to recognise unpleasant facts. It needs to be rooted out like knotweed and disposed of.  

 In Britain, we're still living with the legacy of much Victorian thinking about sturdy beggars and the deserving and undeserving poor. There is a great deal of Podsnappery about. Braverman could easily have fallen out of the pages of a Dickens novel.