Prejudices — Text and Context

The Dog as Social Litmus

Flandrau’s opening gambit is deceptively simple: ask a stranger about dogs. The answer, he claims, never deceives him. He catalogues the telltale phrases—especially “I like dogs, but I like them in their place”—and treats them as symptoms of deeper attitudes. The essay is less about canines than about the social performance of liking. Flandrau notes that almost no one openly admits to disliking dogs; even the vehement dog-hater writes to newspapers “under an assumed name.” This pattern of concealed hostility becomes a template for the book’s broader scrutiny of polite dishonesty.

Two Childhoods, One Narrator

In “Little Pictures of People,” Flandrau contrasts the constrained childhood of Newport’s rich children—paraded in automobiles for an hour’s “romp”—with his own upbringing on Elm Street. He describes his playmates as “the Elm street gang,” later called “muckers,” and insists that he lived two lives: the one he was born to and the one he shared with Irish Catholic families. He recalls sitting with a drowned boy’s family, discussing how to pawn goods for a funeral, and attending wakes where Mrs. Smith led the keening. The passage is precise about class and geography: Elm Street was named for trees that were actually scrub oak or maple, a small irony that signals the gap between aspiration and reality.

The Essayist’s Notebook Method

The book’s structure—short essays originally published in The Bellman—gives Flandrau room to pivot from travel to education to servants. In “Wanderlust” and “Travel,” he treats mobility as both desire and disappointment. “Parents and Children” and “What Is Education?” question received wisdom about upbringing. The essay “In the Undertaker’s Shop” suggests a fascination with the rituals of death that echoes the Elm Street wakes. Throughout, Flandrau avoids systematic argument; he prefers the anecdotal, the overheard, the specific. His tone is skeptical but not cynical, personal but not confessional.

Servants and the Unspoken Contract

The essay “Servants” examines the domestic hierarchies that underpin the comfortable life Flandrau describes elsewhere. He notes the unspoken rules and mutual suspicions that govern employer-employee relations, treating the household as a microcosm of larger social tensions. His observations are drawn from specific encounters, not general principles, and he resists easy moralizing. The essay is a reminder that Prejudices is not a polemic but a series of sketches, each built from the kind of detail—a tone of voice, a hesitation, a too-quick phrase—that Flandrau treats as evidence.

Flandrau’s Prejudices rewards readers who attend to its small moments: the way a woman qualifies her fondness for dogs, the exact texture of a childhood road, the sound of keening at a wake. The essays are best read as a set of interlocking observations rather than a linear argument. Let the contradictions stand—the author who romanticizes Elm Street also writes from Newport—and notice how often Flandrau returns to the gap between what people say and what they mean.

Flandrau’s dogs, quiet judges of the Newport parlors, remind me of my own collie’s disdain for certain guests. That steady, unspoken assessment felt like a kind of honesty. I found that same exacting observation in The Seven Ages of Man — Context and Discussion, where each life stage seems sniffed out, measured, and set aside without pity. It’s a lonely clarity, that gaze.