Y_ll_wpl_sh Papers

I read Thackeray's The Yellowplush Papers the other day. It's a bit of lighthearted frivolity that shows how very different those Victorians were.

Mr Yellowplush (named after the livery of his putative father) is a servant with literary pretensions. Thackeray has him writing perfectly grammatically but with almost phonetic spelling. This makes it a bit challenging to read late at night, especially during the sections where Yellowplush visit 'forin parts' as a 'vallay' and spells French how a nineteenth century cockney would pronounce it. This device was reminiscent of the 'Italian accent' used by Nino Culotto in They're a Weird Mob which every middle class suburban home I visited as a kid seemed to have on its shelves. Now, they're probably each as completely un-PC as the other.

Oh and all the Lords and Princes were S_r B__r D___ to 'protect' their privacy no doubt.

After that whinge, the book was pretty funny in places. Yellowplush is reading his masters' letters, listening at doors and standing behind chairs during the domestic travails of impoverished nobility trying to marry well and avoid debtors' prison. But, by golly, some of the class distinction stuff reminded me why they formed a socialist party.

A lot of the things that were meant to be funny are about how Yellowplush and other servants eat and drink as well as their masters. Their pay mightn't be much but they live off their 'perkisets'. At one point Yellowplush is offered an allowance three times his salary to go off and write full time but he refuses because he'd be worse off. Ho ho. Guess you had to be there on the right side of the green baize door to think it was funny.