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Updated: September 20, 2025
My dear friend, Jack Tufthunt, for example, knows ONE Lord whom he met at a watering-place: old Lord Mumble, who is as toothless as a three-months-old baby, and as mum as an undertaker, and as dull as well, we will not particularise. Tufthunt never has a dinner now but you see this solemn old toothless patrician at the right-hand of Mrs. Tufthunt Tufthunt is a Dinner-giving Snob.
Old Livermore, old Soy, old Chutney, the East Indian Director, old Cutler, the Surgeon, &c., that society of old fogies, in fine, who give each other dinners round and round, and dine for the mere purpose of guttling these, again, are Dinner-giving Snobs.
Especially if you have confidence in the dinner-giving capacity of your host if you know that he is not a man who entertains grovelling views of eating and drinking as a mere satisfaction of hunger and thirst, and, dead to all the finer influences of the palate, expects his guest to be brilliant on ill-flavoured gravies and the cheapest Marsala. Mr.
Poor Dinner-giving Snobs! you don't know what small thanks you get for all your pains and money!
Suppose you sit next to one of these, how pleasant it is, in the intervals of the banquet, actually to abuse the victuals and the giver of the entertainment! It's twice as PIQUANT to make fun of a man under his very nose. 'What IS a Dinner-giving Snob? some innocent youth, who is not REPANDU in the world, may ask or some simple reader who has not the benefits of London experience.
"And all the time you've left her here neglected, while you were taking your amusement in London! You've been dinner-giving and Richmond-going, and theatre-frequenting, and card-playing, and race-horsing and I shouldn't wonder but you've been cock-fighting, and a hundred other things as disreputable, and have come down here worn to a skeleton!"
Dinner-giving is not an integral part of the monarchy, and it might therefore be touched if not too rudely without a political revolution. The grand obstacle would be the unsettled claims. A has given B a show-dinner, and it is the duty of B to return it. Invitation for invitation is the law of the game. How, then, stands the account?
In dinner-giving, as in life, it is the part of genius to turn disaster into advantage. "I was once at a dinner-party," said an accomplisht diner-out, "apparently of undertakers hired to mourn for the joints and birds in the dishes, when part of the ceiling fell. From that moment the guests were as merry as crickets."
One of the popular preachers, declaiming upon the practice of Sunday dinner-giving, averred that when he saw a guest in his best Sunday clothes standing shamelessly upon the doorstep of his host, he felt like seizing him by the shoulder and dragging him from that threshold of perdition.
She even acted her own character, and so well that she did not know it to be precisely her own!” Nor is the exactness of this any less cruel: “We may handle extreme opinions with impunity, while our furniture and our dinner-giving link us to the established order.” Why not own that “the emptiness of all things is never so striking to us as when we fail in them?” Is it not better to avoid “following great reformers beyond the threshold of their own homes?” Does not “our moral sense learn the manners of good society?”
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