Wit & Attitude Quote by Anna Jameson

Jameson’s line cuts against the smug Victorian faith that intellect alone is a moral credential. The insult lands in an unexpected place: not on ignorance, but on numbness. You can be perfectly “sensible” in the era’s sense of rational, orderly, properly educated and still be a fool if you lack sensibility: the capacity to feel, to register another person’s reality, to be moved. She flips a common hierarchy. “Sense” is the respectable trait, the one tied to masculine authority and social power; “sensibility” was often coded as feminine, ornamental, even suspect. Jameson insists it’s not decoration but equipment.

The sentence works because it treats emotional perception as a form of intelligence with real stakes. “Want” does double duty: absence, but also a need. The phrase implies that feeling isn’t merely present or absent; it’s something a person can be deprived of by habit, class training, or self-protective detachment. In a culture where decorum could masquerade as virtue, Jameson targets the polished man who can argue, manage, and judge yet remain unmoved by suffering. His failure isn’t that he can’t think; it’s that he can’t be touched, so his thinking becomes sterile, even cruel.

Jameson wrote amid debates about sympathy, reform, and women’s moral influence, when the novel and essay were expanding the public’s emotional imagination. Her subtext: a society that prizes calculation over compassion will mistake cold competence for wisdom. The fool she names is frighteningly modern: fluent, competent, and emotionally illiterate.