“My Excellent Landlady” - “Our House on Our Street”
In the chapter “Our Street”, Thackeray designates Mrs. Cammysole as “ my excellent landlady.” However, in “Our House on Our Street” Thackeray explicitly features the irony of Mrs. Cammysole’s hypothetical excellence: “Mrs. Cammysole, my landlady, will be rather surprised when she reads this, and finds that a good-natured tenant, who has never complained of her impositions for fifteen years, understands every one of her tricks, and treats them, not with anger, but with scorn--with silent scorn. 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.” Thackeray’s unambiguous revelation deduces that Mrs. Cammysole is not unquestionably excellent because she assaults his confidentiality discounting the budding repercussions that her conduct would countersign. Further, Thackeray’s rejoinder to Mrs. Cammysole’s transgression of the discretion ,embodied in his private correspondences, is ironic. Archetypally, Thackeray would have been exasperated upon grasping that his long standing landlady had been glimpsing the letters.
Irony of the Night Excursion - “On Being Found Out”
The ‘Night Excursion’ does not objectify the intent of downright ensnaring of the thief: “I wonder if the rascal is alive--an elderly scoundrel he must be by this time; and a hoary old hypocrite, to whom an old schoolfellow presents his kindest regards--parenthetically remarking what a dreadful place that private school was; cold, chilblains, bad dinners, not enough victuals, and caning awful!--Are you alive still, I say, you nameless villain, who escaped discovery on that day of crime? I hope you have escaped often since, old sinner.” The excursion which encroaches the boys’ rest incarnates vainness because the thief was not isolated. Thackeray reveals that bidding to ‘find out’ things that should be ‘concealed’ could be a fruitless challenge that leaks the double standards of the individuals who are unwavering in divulging others’ defects, yet they sponsor idiosyncratic limitations that could be correspondingly unveiled.
