Life & Wisdom Quote by Anna Jameson

“Accuracy of language” sounds quaint until you remember what Jameson lived through: an era when public opinion was being industrialized. In early- to mid-19th century Britain, literacy was rising, newspapers and pamphlets were multiplying, and argument was becoming a mass-market product. Jameson’s line is a warning to that new information economy: if words get sloppy, truth doesn’t just get harder to find; it gets easier to counterfeit.

Calling accuracy a “bulwark” is the tell. She’s not praising style for style’s sake, or nitpicking like a pedant with a red pen. A bulwark is fortification language. Truth, in her framing, is under siege - from propaganda, from moral grandstanding, from the comforting fuzziness that lets people believe what they want while sounding principled. Precision becomes a civic technology, the thing that keeps claims accountable to reality.

The subtext also carries a writer’s self-defense. Jameson made her name in criticism, travel writing, and cultural commentary - genres where reputation hinges on getting the world right, not just sounding lyrical. “Accuracy” is ethics. If you misname something, you misframe it; if you misframe it, you quietly change what readers think is possible, blameworthy, or natural.

It works because it refuses the romantic myth that sincerity is enough. Jameson insists that truth needs infrastructure, and that infrastructure is made of exact nouns, honest qualifiers, and the discipline to say less when you know less. That’s not preciousness; it’s responsibility.