Household words, No. 26, September 21, 1850 : $b A weekly journal

How it begins

The extraordinary being, conjured up in the minds of most foreigners under the generic term Englishman, seems to be something more uncommon than the veracious Gulliver ever encountered, and more heterogeneous than John Bulwer in his Artificiall Changeling pourtrayed. As a Spanish olla podrida and a Devonshire squab-pie are said to be made up of all the contradictory edibles that can be conceivably assembled in one dish; so is the hash, cooked up by the French or German novelist and dramatist to represent a true born Briton, an incarnation of every unlikely extravagance it is possible to assemble in one character.