"A coquette is like a recruiting sergeant, always on the lookout for fresh victims"
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Jerrold’s line lands like a grin you don’t quite trust: courtship recast as conscription, flirtation as a kind of small-scale war. Calling the coquette “a recruiting sergeant” isn’t just a jab at vanity; it’s a demotion of romance into bureaucracy and strategy. A sergeant doesn’t fall in love with recruits. He processes them, counts them, keeps the pipeline moving. That’s the sting: the coquette isn’t portrayed as seeking pleasure or even admiration, but as pursuing bodies for the roster, “fresh victims” to replace the bored and discarded.
The intent is comic, but the comedy is weaponized. “Victims” makes seduction sound predatory, yet “recruiting” gives it a sly legitimacy, as if the social world has quietly agreed to treat hearts as expendable resources. Jerrold is mocking a certain kind of social performance where desire is less an emotion than a public transaction, a competitive sport of attention with churn built in. The coquette becomes a figure of appetite and management: always scanning, never satisfied, always needing novelty to maintain power.
Context matters: early Victorian culture was obsessed with propriety, reputation, and the theater of manners, and Jerrold wrote for stages where character types had to read fast and bite hard. The joke flatters the audience’s moral superiority while exposing their fascination with the very games they condemn. It’s satire doing double duty: policing behavior, then winking at the crowd that enjoys watching it happen.
The intent is comic, but the comedy is weaponized. “Victims” makes seduction sound predatory, yet “recruiting” gives it a sly legitimacy, as if the social world has quietly agreed to treat hearts as expendable resources. Jerrold is mocking a certain kind of social performance where desire is less an emotion than a public transaction, a competitive sport of attention with churn built in. The coquette becomes a figure of appetite and management: always scanning, never satisfied, always needing novelty to maintain power.
Context matters: early Victorian culture was obsessed with propriety, reputation, and the theater of manners, and Jerrold wrote for stages where character types had to read fast and bite hard. The joke flatters the audience’s moral superiority while exposing their fascination with the very games they condemn. It’s satire doing double duty: policing behavior, then winking at the crowd that enjoys watching it happen.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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