Passages about money and class

The first man who enclosed a piece of ground and took it into his head to say, this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

Man is naturally good, and it is our institutions alone that have made him bad.

The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Among the new objects that drew my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of conditions.

A power rises above the citizens, absolute, detailed, regular, provident and mild. It would be like a father's authority if, like that, its object were to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks instead to keep them permanently in childhood.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of communism.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity.

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licour / Of which vertu engendred is the flour

Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh for me / To speke of wo that is in mariage.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.

My soul doth magnify the Lord. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled.

Your sheep, that were wont to be so meek and tame and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.

For what justice is this, that a rich goldsmith or an usurer should have a pleasant and wealthy living, and in the meantime a poor labourer, a carter, a smith, without whom no commonwealth could continue, should get so hard and poor a living?

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

It was badly done, indeed!

The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.

The worker therefore feels himself only when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home.

She wanted to die, and she wanted to live in Paris.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.

I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was Papa's doll-child.

Millions of women have done so.

If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.

She never told her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, / Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought, / And with a green and yellow melancholy / She sat like patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief.

Thieves! Thieves! Assassins! Murderers! Justice, just heaven! I am undone, I am murdered, they have cut my throat, they have stolen my money.

Without a dowry.

Go into the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many a court, and you will see representatives of every nation assembled for the profit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mohammedan and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and reserve the name of infidel for those who go bankrupt.

If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two they would cut each other's throats; but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.

The most pressing interest of the ruler, as also his most indispensable duty, is therefore to watch over the observation of the laws of which he is the minister and on which his whole authority is founded.

You need me, for I am rich and you are poor. Let us therefore make an agreement: I will permit you to have the honour of serving me, on condition that you give me what little you have left for the trouble I shall take in commanding you.

What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.

The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, that is, the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

I didn't kill a human being, I killed a principle.

An extraordinary man has the right, that is, not an official right, but an inner right, to decide in his own conscience to overstep certain obstacles.

For a long time I went to bed early.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses.

There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house and studied the lighted square of window.

She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the passage over and over again. All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

O Sugarman done fly away, Sugarman done gone, Sugarman cut across the sky, Sugarman gone home.

They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals, they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth.

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

The Fox and the Grapes: unable to reach the grapes, the fox declared them sour and walked away.

The Tortoise and the Hare: slow and steady wins the race.

We have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.

So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.

Ibn Khaldun opens by exposing the errors and uncritical credulity of earlier historians, arguing that mere chronicle of events without attention to underlying causes produces unreliable history, and proposing instead a genuine science investigating the actual causes of social and political change.

He defines asabiyya as the group solidarity that binds kin together under hard conditions, arguing that nomadic peoples possess this solidarity in abundance, using it to conquer settled, city-dwelling populations whose own comfortable circumstances have eroded their capacity for similar cohesion.

Froissart describes the English longbowmen at Crécy cutting down wave after wave of mounted French knights, a battle that shattered French confidence in the traditional cavalry charge and marked, though Froissart does not frame it this way explicitly, a genuine turning point in how European warfare would be conducted.

Froissart recounts how six leading burghers of Calais, dressed in sackcloth with ropes around their necks, offered their own lives to Edward III in exchange for sparing their starved, besieged city, a gesture of chivalric self-sacrifice Froissart presents as the war's most morally exemplary single episode.

Luther tells the princes and bishops directly that their own greed and tyranny provoked the peasant rising, and warns that God will destroy them entirely if they do not relent and address the genuine grievances underlying the rebellion.

Luther tells the peasants that their grievances may indeed be just, but that they have no right to take up the sword in the name of the gospel, insisting that a Christian properly suffers wrong rather than avenging it through violent rebellion against established authority.

Drafted by the furrier Sebastian Lotzer with the preacher Christoph Schappeler, the manifesto demands the right of each community to choose its pastor, the abolition of serfdom and the small tithe, and free access to game, fish and forest.

Every article is justified from Scripture, with an offer to withdraw any shown to be against God's Word, grounding economic and social grievance in specifically religious authority rather than leaving demands as purely secular political claim.

Harrison surveys English society rank by rank, from gentlemen and nobility down through yeomen, artificers and day labourers, describing precisely what distinguished each rank's manner of living, dress and social standing within the broader Elizabethan social order.

He describes the recent spread of chimneys and glass windows in English houses as a genuine change within living memory, noting how older residents recalled smoky halls without chimneys and houses without glazed windows, a material transformation Harrison treats as significant social evidence.

In a framing scene a drunken tinker is tricked into thinking he is a lord and shown a play, destabilizing the entire main narrative's status from the outset and inviting audiences to question how the following comedy should actually be received.

The fortune-hunter Petruchio takes the job, marries Kate against her will and subjects her to a regime of hunger, sleeplessness and contradiction until she submits, staging psychological domination with unusual explicit detail within a comic framework.

The poet walks by the Thames and sees two swans, white as the brides, gliding down to Essex House while nymphs strew flowers, and follows them to the wedding, staging the river's natural setting as an extended allegorical mirror for the human betrothal.

Between the pageant Spenser laments his own disappointed hopes at court and praises the Earl of Essex, revealing genuine personal grievance and practical patronage concerns surfacing through occasional verse's conventional public celebratory form.

Raleigh describes the capture of the Spanish governor at Trinidad and the ascent of the Orinoco river in open boats, in search of El Dorado, the golden city of Manoa, a considerable expedition undertaken specifically to restore his standing with Elizabeth I.

Raleigh describes the tribes he met and enlisted as English allies against Spain, and the wealth he was told of but never saw, combining calculated imperial diplomatic strategy with an unusually honest admission about treasure he could not actually confirm.

To finance his friend Bassanio's courtship of the heiress Portia, the merchant Antonio borrows from the Jewish moneylender Shylock, whom he has long abused, and agrees in jest to forfeit a pound of his flesh if he defaults on the loan.

Bassanio wins Portia by choosing the right casket, but Antonio's ships are lost and Shylock demands the bond, converting the romantic plot's happy resolution into direct confrontation with the financial crisis threatening Antonio's actual life.

The rebellion continues after Shrewsbury but is ended by a trick, when Prince John promises the rebel lords redress and then arrests them once their army disperses, stages political victory through betrayal of given word rather than honorable combat.

Falstaff, now old and ill, recruits soldiers in Gloucestershire and dines with Justice Shallow, while the sick king broods on the crown he took, giving the play's comic relief genuine melancholy undertone alongside the king's own mortality.

Simon Eyre greets his workers each morning with a torrent of boisterous, half-nonsensical exclamations and endearments, mad Hyperboreans and princes among prentices, establishing from his first appearance the exuberant comic energy that carries the play.

Rowland Lacy disguises himself as a Dutch shoemaker, Hans, and takes work in Eyre's shop specifically to remain near Rose after being forbidden by his uncle the Earl to marry her, a disguise plot that lets a gentleman move, temporarily and by choice, into the working world the play otherwise celebrates.

Caius Martius, a Roman patrician and unmatched soldier, wins the surname Coriolanus by taking the Volscian city of Corioli almost single-handed, put forward for consul but unable to flatter the common people whose votes he needs.

The tribunes provoke him into contempt that gets him banished, and he joins his old enemy Aufidius and leads the Volscians against Rome, personal grievance against the city that rejected him overriding whatever patriotic loyalty his service there might command.

Face, Subtle and Dol Common set up their alchemical fraud in the London house of Face's master Lovewit, who has fled the plague, posing respectively as a servant, an alchemist and his assistant to a stream of gulls each promised exactly what their own particular greed most desires.

Sir Epicure Mammon arrives with a genuinely operatic fantasy of limitless alchemical gold, his greed rendered in language so extravagant that it becomes the play's most memorable single comic performance, exposing greed's capacity for self-deceiving grandiosity more fully than any other single gull.

Sir Giles Overreach, a ruthless extortioner modelled on a real monopolist of the period, has ruined his own nephew Wellborn financially and schemes coldly to marry his daughter Margaret to a lord, treating both family relationships as purely instrumental to his own financial and social advancement.

Wellborn, with the help of the rich widow Lady Allworth, tricks Overreach into believing he is about to marry her and so restore his ruined credit, a deception that uses financial manipulation with genuine poetic justice against a man who built his fortune through exactly this kind of calculated scheme.

The account describes the attack on Nombre de Dios, where Drake was wounded, an early and costly raid on Spanish colonial territory that nonetheless established the pattern of daring assault on Spain's American possessions Drake would pursue throughout his career.

Drake allies with the Cimaroons, escaped African slaves who guided him across the isthmus of Panama, a genuine partnership against shared Spanish colonial power that complicates any simple reading of this voyage as purely English enterprise.

Monsieur Jourdain, a rich cloth merchant's son, spends his money on masters of music, dancing, fencing and philosophy in the hope of passing as a nobleman, and discovers with delight that he has been speaking prose all his life.

Jourdain refuses to let his daughter marry a commoner despite being a commoner himself by birth, so her suitor disguises himself as the son of the Grand Turk and confers a bogus title on Jourdain in an elaborate mock ceremony.

Mirabell asks Millamant to submit to certain conditions before he asks her to marry him, and she answers that she will not be called names after she is married, dwindling into a wife, and that she may by degrees dwindle into a wife, but she will not begin.

Millamant demands the liberty to write and receive letters without interrogation, to come and go as she pleases, to pay and receive visits when and to whom she pleases, to have no obligation to converse with wits she does not like, and never to be called by any fond diminishing name after she is married.

Crusoe describes salvaging what he can from the wrecked ship before it breaks apart entirely, biscuit, gunpowder, tools, and begins the meticulous inventory that will structure his account of the following twenty-eight years.

Struck by a severe fever and convinced he is dying, Crusoe experiences a vision and turns for the first time to a Bible salvaged from the wreck, beginning a religious conversion he comes to read as the true meaning of his shipwreck and isolation.

A reasonable public-spirited projector calculates that Ireland's poverty could be relieved if the children of the poor were fattened and sold at one year old as food for the rich, working through the economics with genuine apparent care.

The projector recommends recipes and lists the advantages to landlords, parents and the nation, dismissing gentler remedies as impractical beside his own carefully reasoned solution.

Hume examines whether the British constitution inclines more toward absolute monarchy or toward a republic, weighing the actual institutional evidence on both sides with genuine skeptical care rather than simply declaring a settled partisan conclusion on a question that divided contemporary political opinion.

He examines the idea of an original contract as the philosophical foundation for legitimate government, testing this influential theory's actual coherence and historical basis rather than simply accepting or rejecting it according to prevailing political doctrine.

Fielding's preface defines his new form directly as a comic epic poem in prose, distinguished from tragedy by its happier resolution and more relaxed, everyday characters, and from burlesque by its faithful, rather than exaggerated, imitation of nature and manners.

Lady Booby dismisses Joseph from her household after he repeatedly and steadfastly refuses her romantic advances, a direct inversion of the predicament facing his sister Pamela in Richardson's novel, where a virtuous servant resists an employer's advances of the opposite sex.

Squire Allworthy discovers an infant left in his own bed, and, moved by the child's helplessness, resolves to raise him as his own despite knowing nothing of his actual parentage, naming him Tom Jones and raising him alongside his sister's son Blifil as presumptive co-heirs to his estate.

Blifil's carefully managed scheming, presented outwardly as pious concern for his uncle's welfare and Tom's own moral correction, gradually poisons Squire Allworthy's opinion of Tom until Tom is banished from the household entirely, a banishment the narrator makes clear stems from Blifil's calculated self-interest rather than any genuine moral failing serious enough to warrant it.

The poem opens at dusk in a village churchyard, the curfew bell tolling the knell of parting day, the lowing herd winding slowly over the lea, and the speaker left to darkness and to himself among the graves of the obscure village dead.

The speaker insists that the unmarked dead beneath the turf might have possessed hearts once pregnant with celestial fire, hands that might have swayed empires or roused the living lyre, had not poverty repressed their noble rage and frozen the genial current of their soul.

Lui declares that he would rather be a brilliant madman than a dull, sensible fool, and defends this preference at length, arguing that dullness serves no one while even a corrupt genius at least provides entertainment and occasional insight.

Lui performs, alone at the café table, an entire imagined opera and an entire imagined society dinner in rapid succession, switching voices, postures and instruments with such total physical commitment that onlookers gather to watch, and Moi records the performance with genuine, unresolved admiration.

I have this day begun to keep a Journal, which I intend to labour to make as perfect as I can.

I felt a completion of happiness. I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind.

Major von Tellheim, discharged from military service and under suspicion of dishonesty despite his actual innocence, has broken off his engagement to Minna von Barnhelm specifically because he refuses to bring a ruined name into marriage, treating his compromised reputation as a genuine barrier rather than something love alone could overcome.

Minna arrives in Berlin searching for Tellheim, and when direct argument fails to move him from his stubborn position, she tricks him by pretending she too has been disinherited, restoring symmetry to their circumstances so that his own sense of honor now obliges him to marry her rather than continuing to refuse.

Goldsmith opens by addressing Auburn directly as the loveliest village of the plain, recalling in loving, specific detail its parson, its schoolmaster, its alehouse and the evening games and gatherings that once filled its now-empty green.

He describes a single rich landowner enclosing the common land that had once supported the village's many small farming families, converting shared agricultural ground into a private pleasure park and driving the villagers from the land that had sustained them for generations.

Tony Lumpkin, delighting in mischief, misdirects the traveling Marlow and his friend Hastings, convincing them that the Hardcastle family home is actually a country inn, a prank that sets the entire subsequent plot of mistaken identity and comic misunderstanding in motion.

Marlow, believing Mr. Hardcastle to be an innkeeper rather than his own prospective father-in-law, treats the older man with an easy, presumptuous familiarity entirely unlike the deference he would show if he understood the actual social relationship between them, producing sustained comic confusion neither man is able to resolve for some time.

Asked as a young man to write a bill of sale for a slave, Woolman wrote it but told his employer that he believed slavekeeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion, and afterward refused to write any instrument that conveyed a human being.

Travelling among Friends in Maryland, Virginia and Carolina, Woolman stayed in slaveholding households, spoke with the masters one by one about the burden on their consciences, and left money for the enslaved who had served him.

Lady Sneerwell's circle manufactures scandal for sport, and the brothers Surface are its subjects: Joseph, a hypocrite of fine sentiments, and Charles, an open-handed spendthrift who is the better man, staging gossip as genuine social institution.

Their rich uncle Sir Oliver returns from India in disguise to test them, staging character assessment through deliberate deception, the brothers revealing their genuine natures without knowing they are actually being evaluated for the inheritance at stake.

Is there for honest poverty / That hings his head, an' a' that? / The coward slave, we pass him by, / We dare be poor for a' that!

The rank is but the guinea's stamp, / The man's the gowd for a' that.

Wollstonecraft accuses Burke of sentimental theatricality, of feeling for the queen of France and the pageantry of the old order while the sufferings of the poor, the pressed sailor and the game-law victim, leave him unmoved.

Against Burke's defence of property and hereditary privilege in the name of tradition she sets natural rights grounded in reason and God, arguing that the age of a custom is no argument for it.

Franklin describes drawing up a chart with the thirteen virtues, temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity and humility, each assigned a column, and resolving to give strict attention to one virtue at a time in weekly rotation while marking every daily failure with a small black spot.

Franklin admits candidly that he never came close to achieving the freedom from fault the chart aimed at, and that pride in particular proved nearly impossible to root out, since even the appearance of humility, he confesses, became for him a source of considerable private pride.

The learned professors of the rights of men regard prescription as a curse, but somehow or other the duke of Bedford is the leviathan among all the creatures of the crown.

He is the Leviathan of all the creatures of the crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk, he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty. Huge as he is, and whilst he sports and plays like the great fish, he think himself a mighty hunter.

The volume opens with Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which a sailor shoots an albatross, watches his shipmates die, and is redeemed when he blesses the water-snakes unaware, and must tell his tale forever.

Between are ballads of the rural poor, a girl who insists that her dead brother and sister still make seven, a mad mother, an idiot boy sent for the doctor, and an old huntsman whose neighbours will not let him gather wood.

Hansel and Gretel, abandoned in the forest by parents who can no longer feed them, follow a trail of breadcrumbs that birds eat before they can retrace their steps, and are lured by hunger to a house made of bread, cake and sugar belonging to a witch who intends to eat them.

Cinderella's stepmother and stepsisters mutilate their own feet, cutting off toe and heel, in a failed attempt to fit the golden slipper, and at the wedding birds peck out the stepsisters' eyes as punishment for their cruelty, a considerably harsher conclusion than most later popular versions retain.

Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son in a provincial town under the Restoration, admires Napoleon in secret and takes holy orders as the only route open to ambition, exposing how thoroughly the Restoration's structural corruption closed legitimate paths to advancement.

As tutor in the house of the mayor, Monsieur de Rênal, he seduces the mayor's wife; sent to Paris as secretary to the Marquis de la Mole, he wins the marquis's proud daughter Mathilde, class boundaries proving genuinely permeable to skilled self-presentation.

In certain provincial houses there are faces marked by no more expression than is on the face of an ox at pasture, and it is thus that the town of Saumur described the face of old Grandet.

Gold in itself is nothing, said Grandet, it is only good for turning into gold.

All is true.

Paris, its houses, its heights, its low quarters, all of it seemed to say to him, now it is between the two of us.

But a mermaid has no tears, and so she suffers so much more.

But he has nothing on at all!

Mr. Pickwick, addressing his fellow club members before setting out on their travels, is described with gentle mock-heroic grandeur, his spectacles, his gaiters, his earnest scientific curiosity about matters of no real consequence, establishing from the first chapter the novel's affectionate, comic register.

Sam Weller, introduced partway through the novel as Pickwick's new servant, greets his employer and everyone else with a relentless stream of cockney wit, proverbs and improbable anecdotes, a comic voice so immediately popular with original readers that sales of the monthly parts increased dramatically from the moment he appeared.

Sir Walter Scott, in speaking of him, we are to speak chiefly of the literary man, though it was not chiefly as a literary man that he wished to be regarded, or perhaps was regarded, either by himself or by the world.

The Waverley Novels, without one true delineation of human passion or human character, have taught all men this, at least, that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state-papers, controversies and abstractions of men.

Dana describes the captain ordering a sailor tied to the rigging and flogged for a minor, disputed offense, and records his own helpless fury at witnessing the punishment, unable to intervene given his own position aboard the ship.

He describes the work of curing and stacking hides at San Diego, sailors laboring for weeks on the beach in a trade that supplied the leather manufacturing of the eastern United States from a coast most Americans of his time had never seen or thought about.

Lisbeth Fischer, being still unmarried at forty-two, was nicknamed Cousin Bette in the family.

Vice always finds a defender to plead for it, whereas virtue, when it has no reward, finds nothing but incredulity.

Micawber declares that his own financial rule of life is simple: annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness; annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery, a formula he himself never once manages to actually live by.

Uriah Heep insists repeatedly on his own umbleness, how umble he is, how umble his mother is, a performed humility David gradually recognizes as covering a genuinely dangerous, calculating ambition to rise by controlling those around him.

Taking the standing of woman as citizen, as wife, as widow and as mother in turn, Stanton shows that women are taxed and tried without representation, and that on marriage a wife loses her property, her earnings, her name and the custody of her children.

She argues from the Declaration of Independence and the common law and demands the vote and legal equality, grounding her demand in both America's own founding revolutionary principles and in the accumulated technical legal tradition.

Gradgrind opens the novel by instructing a schoolroom that facts alone are wanted in life, nothing else will ever be of any service, and that children should be taught nothing but facts, planting nothing else and rooting out everything else.

Louisa, married off to the much older Bounderby with no real feeling on either side, tells her father directly that she has never had a childhood in any real sense, and asks him what he has left within her to call upon now that Bounderby's marriage proposal has forced an actual choice requiring more than facts.

The long opening chapter, Economy, itemises the cost of the house and of his food and argues that most people work far more than they need to, spending their lives on what he calls the necessaries and then on luxuries that only hinder them.

Thoreau went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if he could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when he came to die, discover that he had not lived.

Emerson describes the English as a people of remarkable physical stamina and stubborn practicality, possessing a genius for machinery and trade that has made them, in his assessment, the most formidable nation currently existing, even as he confesses genuine doubt about whether this practical genius leaves adequate room for spiritual ambition.

He records his visit to Thomas Carlyle at Craigenputtock, describing Carlyle's conversation as possessing a force and a seriousness Emerson found almost nowhere else during his time in England, a visit that opens the book and frames everything that follows against this initial, exceptional encounter.

Tocqueville argues that the French Revolution completed work the monarchy had already begun: centralisation, the destruction of local liberty, the separation of classes and the growing equality of Frenchmen under a single administration were all in place before 1789.

The nobility had been reduced to a caste with privileges but no function, and it was precisely when its privileges ceased to buy the peasants any service that they became intolerable.

William Dorrit, presiding over the Marshalsea's debtors as its unofficial Father for so many years that he has ceased fully to register his own imprisonment as confinement, receives the prison's customary tributes and courtesies with a threadbare, entirely sincere dignity that the novel presents as genuinely tragic rather than merely absurd.

News of an unexpected inheritance arrives and frees the Dorrit family from the Marshalsea after decades of confinement, and the novel makes clear almost immediately that the money, far from healing the family, simply relocates William Dorrit's prison-formed vanity and denial into a wealthier, more socially visible setting.