Conclusion

No writer is more dependent than Thackeray on his readers’ alertness in detecting gradations and changes of tone in his discourse. The very terms we have watched him use to designate what he calls, in neutral gear, ‘German’ and ‘Germany’, act as signals. In Henry Esmond, ‘Dutch’ is part of an archaizing discourse, corresponding to ‘deutsch’, but it may also suggest disapproval in such combinations as ‘Dutch mistresses’ (xiii. 373). ‘High Dutch’, a caique of ‘hochdeutsch’, is generally uncomplimentary: ‘High Dutch monsters’ (i. 29), ‘High Dutch cobbler’ (i. 446—a deliberate change from the previous description of Stiffelkind as a ‘German bootmaker’, to indicate Stubbs’s contempt and hostility); but it may also mark the narrator’s sense of something Englishmen find difficult and outlandish, as when, in Vanity Fair, Georgy makes ‘prodigious advances in High Dutch’ (xi. 787—8). ‘Bedutsch’ is a humorous calque of ‘verdeutschen’, alleging a German urge to translate works from the remotest languages into their own in search of stimulation for an ever-ready fountain of tears (v. 44). ‘Allemannian’ introduces mockery of something uncouth, as in the evocation of prodigiously thick ‘Allemannian ankles’ (i. 30), and ‘Teutonic’ holds suggestions of something primitive—when the German-born duchess of Orleans speaks, at the French court, ‘in softest Teutonic’, one surmises that she has softened her native dialect but that it would not sound all that soft to French ears (i. 338). ‘Almaine’ or ‘Almayne’ takes us into high company of the past: ‘Almaine’s Emperor, with the crown of Charlemagne on his imperial brow’ (iv. 151). The same term may, however, be used for the sake of comic contrast, as when an ‘odious and amusing group’ of ship’s passengers is said to be made up of ‘Jews of Poland and Almayne’ (LPP iv. 441). ‘Deutschland’ is employed when characters wish to make an emotional appeal, as when a Prussian envoy suggests to a Pumpernickelian sovereign that his little country has a patriotic duty to fight for ‘the 491rights of Deutschland’ against the ‘yoke of the usurper’ Napoleon; ‘Deutschland’ may also be used, however, to stress the foreign origins of the British royal family, as when Prince Albert is called, in ‘The Snobs of England’, ‘the greatest Prince out of the smallest and most illustrious court in Deutschland’ (ix. 312). The Snobographer’s ‘illustrious’ points the irony: snobbish sycophants may so describe Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha, but most readers of Punch could be expected to disagree. The term ‘fatherland’ indicates the real or assumed patriotism of the speaker, as in the dialogue between the ruler of Pumpernickel and the Prussian envoy, where local patriotism (‘Alaaf Pumpernickel!’) is set against the claims of an all-German patriotism on which the Prussian envoy bases his demands. Here again, mockery may predominate, as when King Otto (or Otho) of Greece, who stems from Bavaria, is said to be prevented only by lack of funds from decamping ‘to dear old Deutschland, Fatherland, Beerland’ (ix. 126). We also find careful periphrases in the discourse of a speaker who wishes to stress the supposed racial affinity between his Germany and a visitor’s England. Fitz-Boodle is introduced by court architect von Speck as ‘a young scion of British Adel’ come to see ‘his brethren of the great family of Hermann’ and thus refresh himself at ‘the Urquellen of his race’ (iv. 291). Germany, it will be noticed, is thought, by the speaker, to be the oldest member, the primal source, of this postulated ‘family’. In what we learn of the motives that have brought Fitz-Boodle to Germany, that of refreshing himself at the primal sources of his ‘race’ does not play the part surmised by the patriotic von Speck. Though Thackeray does, on occasions, hint at a family relationship between Englishmen and Germans, Fitz-Boodle, whose name joins a Norman-French patronymic to a Germanic element, cannot feel himself as securely a member of the ‘great family’ of Arminius as his German host.