Contemporary Quotations

Contemporary Quotations establish the contexts for Holding Fire!

Wisdom and experience
What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
And in the wither’d field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain.
William Blake, ‘The Four Zoas’, c.1795-1804

The Condition-of-England question
We are aware that, according to the newspapers, Chartism is extinct; that a Reform Ministry has ‘put down the chimera of Chartism’ in the most felicitous effectual manner. So say the newspapers; - and yet, alas, most readers of newspapers know withal that it is indeed the ‘chimera’ of Chartism, not the reality, which has been put down; or rather has fallen down and gone asunder by gravitation and law of nature: but the living essence of Chartism has not been put down. Chartism means the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore or the wrong disposition of the Working Classes of England. It is a new name for a thing which has had many names, which will yet have many. The matter of Chartism is weighty, deep-rooted, far-extending; did not begin yesterday; will by no means end this day or tomorrow.
Thomas Carlyle, ‘Chartism’, 1839

Drunkenness
And when [the public houses] close at about eleven o’clock, the drunks pour out of them and generally sleep off their intoxication in the gutter. The reasons for this state of affairs are perfectly clear. First and foremost, factory work is largely responsible. Work in low rooms where people breathe in more coal fumes and dust than oxygen – and in the majority of cases beginning already at the age of six – is bound to deprive them of all strength and joy in life. The weavers, who have individual looms in their homes, sit bent over them from morning till night, and desiccate their spinal marrow in front of a hot stove. Those who do not fall prey to mysticism are ruined by drunkenness.
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845

No revolution
Your prediction that we will get the Charter in the course of the present year, and the abolition of private property within three years, will certainly not be realised. The body of the English people, without becoming a slavish people, are becoming an eminently pacific people… Organised conflicts such as we may look for in France, Germany, Italy and Spain cannot take place in this country. To organise, to conspire a revolution in this country would be a vain and foolish project.
George Julian Harney, letter to Friedrich Engels, 1846

Self-help
The people can only help themselves. Only they can put restrictions on the increase of their numbers, and keep population on a level with capital… Their fate is given into their own hands; they are responsible for their own conditions; the rich are no more responsible for their condition than they are responsible for the condition of the rich; and if they cannot help themselves, all experience demonstrates that the rich cannot help them.
The Economist, 1849

Belgravia morality
It is easy enough to be moral after a good dinner beside a snug sea-coal fire, and with our hearts well warmed with fine old port. It is easy enough for those that can enjoy these things daily to pay their poor rates, rent their pew, and love their neighbours as themselves; but place the self-same ‘highly respectable’ people on a raft without sup or bite on the high seas, and they would toss up who should eat their fellows. Morality on £5000 a year in Belgrave Square is a very different thing to morality on slop-wages in Bethnal Green.
Henry Mayhew, report of a speech made at a public meeting of tailors, 1850

Philanthropy
Philanthropists always seek to do too much, and in this is to be found the main cause of their repeated failures. The poor are expected to become angels in an instant, and the consequence is, they are merely made hypocrites… It would seem, too, that this overweening disposition to play the part of pedagogues (I use the word in its literal sense) to the poor, proceeds rather from a love of power than from a sincere regard for the people.
Henry Mayhew, The Morning Chronicle, 1861

A cruel and unwise generation
Yes, believe me, in spite of our political liberality, and poetical philanthropy; in spite of our almshouses, hospitals, and Sunday-schools; in spite of our missionary endeavours to preach abroad what we cannot get believed at home; and in spite of our wars against slavery, indemnified by the presentation of ingenious bills, – we shall be remembered in history as the most cruel, and therefore the most unwise, generation of men that ever yet troubled the earth:- the most cruel in proportion to their science. No people, understanding pain, ever inflicted so much: no people, understanding facts, ever acted on them so little.
John Ruskin, The Eagle’s Nest, 1872

Comfortable obliviousness
In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants – all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.
George Orwell, ‘Down the Mine’, 1937

Methodism and repression
Nothing was more often remarked by contemporaries of the workaday Methodist character, or of Methodist home-life, than its methodical, disciplined and repressed disposition. It is the paradox of a ‘religion of the heart’ that it should be notorious for the inhibition of all spontaneity. Methodism sanctioned ‘workings of the heart’ only upon the occasions of the Church; Methodists wrote hymns but no secular poetry of note; the idea of a passionate Methodist lover in these years is ludicrous. (‘Avoid all manner of passions’, advised Wesley.) The word is unpleasant; but it is difficult not to see in Methodism in these years a ritualized form of psychic masturbation. Energies and emotions which were dangerous to social order, or which were merely unproductive… were released in the harmless form of sporadic love-feasts, watch-nights, band-meetings or revivalist campaigns. At these love-feasts, after hymns and the ceremonial breaking of cake or water-biscuit, the preacher then spoke, in a raw emotional manner, of his spiritual experiences, temptations and contests with sin: ‘While the preacher is thus engaged, sighs, groans, devout aspirations, and… ejaculations of prayer or praise, are issuing from the audience in every direction.’
In the tension which succeeded, individual members of the congregation then rose to their feet and made their intimate confessions of sin or temptation, often of a sexual implication… Since joy was associated with sin and guilt, and pain (Christ’s wounds) with goodness and love, so every impulse became twisted into the reverse, and it became natural to suppose that man or child only found grace in God’s eyes when performing painful, laborious or self-denying tasks. To labour and to sorrow was to find pleasure, and masochism was ‘Love’.
E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1963

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