Essay Questions

Outline the cultural presumptions of the chapter titles “Our Street” and “Our House on Our Street”.

The pronoun “Our” alludes to taut collectivism; whereby, the tenants in the house and the others the adjoining apartments wholly ratify reciprocal communism. The interpersonal connections between the disparate tenants are ostensibly forceful due to the yoking stimuluses, augmented by the public street and the house together with other joint spaces within the houses. The tenants feel as fragments of the community which proliferates with their realization of belongingness.

Which pertinent proverb would you use to encapsulate Thackeray’s ideology in “On Being Found Out”?

The superlative proverb would be: “Let Sleeping Dogs Lie.” Thackeray submits: “Just consider what life would be, if every rogue was found out, and flogged coram populo! What a butchery, what an indecency, what an endless swishing of the rod! Don't cry out about my misanthropy. My good friend Mealymouth, I will trouble you to tell me, do you go to church? When there, do you say, or do you not, that you are a miserable sinner, and saying so do you believe or disbelieve it? If you are a M. S., don't you deserve correction, and aren't you grateful if you are to be let off? I say again what a blessed thing it is that we are not all found out!” Struggling to excavate uninvited minutiae is tantamount with pestering ‘sleeping dogs’ which would inflame a demeaning slimy slope that maims a victim’s affability. After all, arousing all the depravity that is integral in humankind would not douse in-built failings.