"A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell"
About this Quote
The intent isn’t simply to contrast two housing markets. It’s to sketch two moral economies. In England, the house signifies continuity: property as inheritance, family as a long story, stability as a social ideal. In America, the house becomes a disposable wrapper around ambition. You don’t settle; you upgrade, relocate, chase the next opening. The subtext is anxiety about what gets lost when permanence becomes optional: intergenerational responsibility, community memory, even the humility of being shaped by a place rather than always reshaping it.
Context matters. Writing in the 19th century, Stowe is watching a nation defined by expansion, speculation, and reinvention - a country where land is abundant, towns boom and bust, and the frontier mentality seeps into domestic life. As an author preoccupied with the ethics of home (and who gets to have one), she’s also hinting at a harsher truth: “shedding” is easier for those whose homes were never precarious in the first place. The line reads like cultural diagnosis, but it doubles as warning: a society that treats shelter like luggage may start treating people the same way.
Quote Details
| Topic | Legacy & Remembrance |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. (2026, January 15). A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-man-builds-a-house-in-england-with-the-158388/
Chicago Style
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. "A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-man-builds-a-house-in-england-with-the-158388/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-man-builds-a-house-in-england-with-the-158388/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.
