Postcard from a Travel Snob — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Postcard from a Travel Snob
The poems
What you need to know
Postcard from a Travel Snob by Sophie Hannah (1996): a holidaymaker's postcard sneering at package tourists, and how Hannah uses a strict rhyming form, comic compound words and a speaker who reveals more than they mean to.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the collection it compares well with, and on which themes.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I do not wish that anyone were here.', 'with karaoke nights and pints of beer', 'for drunken tourist types – perish the thought', 'This is a peaceful place, untouched by man', 'not like your seaside-town-consumer-hell', 'I’m sleeping in a local farmer’s van', 'I’m not your sun-and-sangria-two-weeks-', 'When you’re as multi-cultural as me', 'your friends become wine connoisseurs, not drunks', 'I am an anthropologist in trunks.'.
Form and structure: sixteen lines of rhymed pentameter in the form of a postcard, an opening line that twists the usual postcard greeting, and a punchline in the last two lines.
Language: long hyphenated insults, negatives ('not', 'Nobody'), a boastful tone that gives the speaker away, and irony in a place 'untouched by man' that the speaker is visiting.
Context: Hannah, born in Manchester, whose light, witty verse is often compared with Wendy Cope's; the poem's publication in 1996; and the cheap package holidays that first gave most people in Britain affordable travel abroad.
Compares well with: First Flight (travellers who look down on others), Stewart Island (a holiday place seen with irony), and Home Thoughts from Abroad (attitudes to England and abroad).
