The Podsnappery Paradigm

        Mr. John Podsnap is a man of vast moral deficiencies and unparalleled haughtiness. Podsnap is at home within the strict confines of Victorian society, shunning any convention or manner which is contrary to the supernormal. Best described on page 132 of Our Mutual Friend, Podsnap is a sort of animated embodiment of boring and uninteresting daily routine. Anything outside of a well established routine he treats with aversion and contempt. Podsnap acts as a caricature of the close-minded, rigid, selfish, and morally corrupt members of Victorian era London's upper middle class.

           Podsnap is deeply concerned with appearances, aptly displayed in his Narcissus like obsession with his own reflection. He cares for little outside of his own, established internal world. Anything outside of the boundaries of Podsnap is catalogued as very unPodsnaplike and becomes the object of intense avoidance or verbal abuse. This selfishness is used by Dickens to emulate the opinions of many Victorian members of high society. Proponents of podsnappery were prevalent throughout Dickens's world, and, in fact, are quite commonplace still today, especially in the realms of business and finance.

         Close-mindedness is another key element of the ways of the Podsnap, and becomes thoroughly apparent in his dialogs with others, specifically with the foreigner and the meek gentleman during the Podsnaps' dinner party. Anything alien to John Podsnap is treated as some sort of apocryphal and useless deviation from the proper, i.e. English, manner of living. His bottomless ignorance is a representation of the xenophobia that plagues those who own some money, yet little intelligence.

         Being a Podsnap is about living a nine to five lifestyle, and furthermore, being a nine to five lifestyle. Nothing should ever be out of the ordinary, for anything not part of or different than a predetermined and rigid structure must clearly lack integrity in some way. Even artistic expression itself, a function defined by creativity and outward thinking, should be devoted to maintaining a predetermined style. Podsnap embraces sameness and uniformity, and venomously rejects any thing or person that attempts to break from the confines of established social constructs. Many members of the upper strata of Victorian society embodied such podsnapperous manners, and Dickens is clearly satirizing the inherent dangers of conformity that were prevalently at home in his era and location.

          These various facets of Mr. John Podsnap are merely reflections of the characteristics of many of Dickens's contemporaries, and tie in well to the central theme of Our Mutual Friend: the moral corruptions induced by avarice. The Podsnaps' very existence is deeply rooted in their financial superiority to other human beings, and their loathsome characteristics are byproducts of their position. As financially well-to-do members of a society which values capitalistic prosperity above common human decency, the Podsnaps have become the Frankenstein monster of pecuniary glorification. Through his description of Mr. Podsnap and his podsnappery in book I chapter XI, Dickens is warning of the corrupting power of wealth, as well as the shortsightedness and petty cruelty associated with an overzealous pursuit of social betterment.