A Greenwich reader of Victorian fiction reads about British husbands attending dinner parties mainly to check the television package and opens Our Mutual Friend
Saturday, 24 October 2026. Greenwich, South East London. My dining room the morning after a dinner party for eight, a stack of plates, a red wine stain shaped like the Isle of Wight, Our Mutual Friend open at chapter two, 10.15am.
Why Men Really Go
The London Prat has a report on British dinner parties and why husbands mainly go to check for Sky Sports, presented with all the trappings of social research: an institute, fieldworkers observing twenty-two dinners, timed findings and a consultant physician diagnosing clinical exhaustion in men asked to discuss contemporary art. The key moment of the evening, in many households, is a husband discovering whether the host has the full sports package by asking the teenage son, the only person who would know.
I gave a dinner party last night. My husband, a retired naval engineer, asked our host, which was me, whether we had the football channels. I said we have had them for eleven years. He said he just wanted to check. Then he spent the evening explaining the 1966 World Cup to a woman from Bangalore who knows more about cricket than he knows about anything. The Prat was not exaggerating. It was taking minutes.
Bran-New People In A Bran-New House
Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, published in parts in 1864 and 1865, contains the best dinner parties in English fiction. They are given by Mr and Mrs Veneering, whom Dickens introduces as bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything they own is new. Their furniture is new, their friends are new, their silver is new and their carriage is new. Their very surface, Dickens says, smells a little too much of the workshop.
The Veneerings give dinners to establish themselves in society, and their guests are mostly people they barely know. The most famous is Twemlow, a mild, elderly, impoverished gentleman with aristocratic connections, who is invited constantly as a sort of furniture. Dickens describes him as an innocent piece of dinner-furniture who goes upon easy castors and is kept over a livery stable-yard. When the Veneerings want to make the table larger, they add Twemlow, as one might add a leaf.
The Man In The Hallway
The men in the Prat report are Twemlows in reverse. Twemlow is invited because he is decorative and does not mind being moved about. The husbands in the report attend for their own reasons, mainly sporting, and leave the moment they decently can. By twenty to eleven, the piece notes, nine in ten are in the hallway discussing leaving, while the host loads the dishwasher. The Veneering dinners have the same dying fall. Guests drift away, carriages are called, and Mrs Veneering is left with the silver and the strangers.
What Dickens adds, and what makes the Veneering scenes so brilliant, is the chorus of guests around the table: Podsnap, who dismisses any subject he finds disagreeable with a flourish of his arm; Lady Tippins, a heavily painted elderly flirt; the Analytical Chemist, who is in fact the butler, gloomily serving wine. Everybody at the table is performing. Nobody is talking. Dickens understood that the English dinner party is less a conversation than a series of monologues held in the same room.
Podsnappery At My Table
Podsnap’s gesture, the sweep of the arm that clears away any unwelcome subject, is the ancestor of the moment in the report when a husband changes the conversation to football. Podsnap says, I don’t want to know about it, I don’t choose to discuss it, and the subject vanishes. My husband said much the same last night when the woman from Bangalore raised the subject of English cricket’s recent results. He swept his arm, mentioned 1966 and refilled the wine. Dickens called it Podsnappery. I call it Tuesday.
Elsewhere in British humour this week, the Daily Mash offered a guide for middle-class households getting through the Sally Rooney book drought, which would have been a useful supply of dinner conversation for anyone not discussing football. The Veneerings would have bought six copies and displayed them unopened.
An Indian Guest At A Victorian Table
My guest from Bangalore told me last night about her great-grandfather, a lawyer who studied in London in the 1880s and attended dinner parties not unlike the Veneerings’. Indian students in Victorian London were often invited as curiosities, the way Twemlow was invited as furniture. Some, like the young Gandhi a few years later, wrote about the bewildering etiquette of English dinners, the cutlery, the meat, the rituals of conversation. Her great-grandfather, she said, survived by agreeing with everyone and eating only the potatoes. I said that was the most English strategy available. She said it was also the most Indian.
The Washing Up
The plates are still in the sink. My husband is watching the football. The Isle of Wight stain may be permanent. Our Mutual Friend ends happily for most of its decent characters, and badly for the Veneerings, who go bankrupt and retire to Calais. I will not be going bankrupt over one dinner party, but I will be retiring to the sofa with Dickens while my husband discovers that the dishwasher has not loaded itself. It is the least the Prat would want.