Life & Wisdom Quote by Terry Prachett

Pratchett lands the joke with the casual menace of someone who’s watched culture sprint ahead and leave basic perspective gasping on the curb. The line pretends to be an innocent update on Dickens’s productivity, then swerves: a Victorian titan of serialization and public appetite is being judged by a late-1990s yardstick, as if greatness now requires a “home page” like a stamp of existence. The comedy comes from deliberate category error. Of course Dickens didn’t build a website; the punchline is that our habits of measuring relevance barely notice the absurdity.

The specific intent is a gentle skewering of technological presentism: the reflex to treat the newest platform as the default venue for legitimacy. By choosing Dickens, Pratchett picks a figure synonymous with mass media in his own era, a reminder that every age has its infrastructure for attention. Dickens had periodicals, public readings, and a celebrity machine; the internet didn’t invent audiences, it just changed the furniture.

Subtextually, Pratchett is also defending the slow, stubborn work of making things that outlast the delivery mechanism. A “home page” is a performance of presence, a little shrine to being searchable. Dickens’s “page,” in the only sense that matters, is the one people still turn. It’s a jab at our itch to retrofit the past into a timeline of progress, where anyone not optimized for current channels gets quietly downgraded. Pratchett’s wit insists on a more bracing idea: the medium changes, the hunger to be seen doesn’t, and art that sticks doesn’t need to keep up with our latest admin.