“Our Street”
The chapter “Our House on our Street” utilizes manifest ‘Name Play’ to explicate Thackeray and Mrs. Cammysole’s divergent dispositions. Thackeray’s middle name, Makepeace, renders him a reconciliatory persona who would not stimulate superfluous strife. To elaborate, Thackeray acknowledges, “On the 18th of December, 1837, for instance, coming gently down stairs, and before my usual wont, I saw you seated in my arm-chair, peeping into a letter that came from my aunt in the country, just as if it had been addressed to you, and not to "M. A. Titmarsh, Esq." Did I make any disturbance? far from it; I slunk back to my bedroom (being enabled to walk silently in the beautiful pair of worsted slippers Miss Penelope J--s worked for me: they are worn out now, dear Penelope!) and then rattling open the door with a great noise, descending the stairs, singing "Son vergin vezzosa" at the top of my voice.” Here, Thackeray espouses the prerogative to antagonize Mrs. Cammysole for examining his mails devoid of his approval. Nonetheless, he elects not to trigger any skirmish with her because he is chivalrous. Comparatively, the name Cammysole paints Mrs. Cammysole’s proclivity for other people’s underclothes for it relates to the ‘camisole’. Her snooping is analogous to dissecting out other people’s undergarments (which denote classified affairs) to soothe her infuriating oddity.
“On Being Found Out”
Thackeray’s germane samples accentuate the ubiquity of deceit among humanity: “And yet to be found out, I know from my own experience, must be painful and odious, and cruelly mortifying to the inward vanity. Suppose I am a poltroon, let us say. With fierce mustache, loud talk, plentiful oaths, and an immense stick, I keep up nevertheless a character for courage. I swear fearfully at cabmen and women; brandish my bludgeon, and perhaps knock down a little man or two with it: brag of the images which I break at the shooting gallery, and pass among my friends for a whiskery fire-eater, afraid of neither man nor dragon.” Barefaced self-referencing gathers that even Thackeray is predisposed to the degradation of being inauspiciously “found out.” The depraved sides are native constituents of humanity that cannot be obliterated from an individual’s identity, so they should be weathered auspiciously instead of inputting the conceit of divulging them.
‘Being find out’ could immensely upset one’s venerable repute effortlessly: “Ah me! Suppose some brisk little chap steps up and gives me a caning in St. James's Street, with all the heads of my friends looking out of all the club windows. My reputation is gone. I frighten no man more. My nose is pulled by whipper-snappers, who jump up on a chair to reach it. I am found out. And in the days of my triumphs, when people were yet afraid of me, and were taken in by my swagger, I always knew that I was a lily liver, and expected that I should be found out some day.” Affirmative standing is primarily instituted on the peripheral aspects that are straightforwardly detected by character auditors. Revelation of destructive unfamiliar qualities would unambiguously denigrate one’s eccentric.
