What does Charles Dickens mean when he says “toadies and humbugs†in his book, Great Expectations?
In Great Expectations, there's this rich old woman, Miss Havisham, who has a bunch of relatives who want her money when she dies. Those family members go out of their way to flatter Miss Havisham, who's a weird and wealthy spinster. The toady people are total fakes. Equally deceptive, humbugs are pretenders who hope to score advantage by acting like something they're not.
In his narration of Great Expectations, Pip points out . . .
There were three ladies in the room and one gentleman. Before I had been standing at the window five minutes, they somehow conveyed to me that they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them pretended not to know that the others were toadies and humbugs: because the admission that he or she did know it, would have made him or her out to be a toady and humbug.
The toadies and humbugs in Dickens's classic novel don't end up getting what they expect to gain. Others in the book, though, do come out ahead.