"Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine"
About this Quote
Dickens needles a society that treats virtue like a dress code. In one sly line, he collapses “dignity” and even “holiness” into the material trivia of “coat and waistcoat,” exposing how easily moral authority is mistaken for good tailoring. The joke lands because the nouns are so weighty and the garments so mundane: sanctity reduced to haberdashery. It’s not just snobbery he’s lampooning, but the bureaucratic, middle-class reflex to read character off surfaces - to let fabric stand in for conscience.
The phrasing does double work. “Sometimes” gives him plausible deniability, the authorial shrug that makes the indictment sharper: he isn’t claiming every clergyman is a fraud or every poor man is pure, only that the public’s moral eyesight is famously bad. “Some people imagine” points outward to the reader’s neighbors while quietly implicating the reader. If you’ve ever trusted a uniform, a frock coat, a respectable silhouette, Dickens suggests you’ve participated in the con.
Contextually, it fits his broader project: prying open Victorian respectability to show the rot and the tenderness underneath. In Dickens’s world, institutions often outsource ethics to appearances - law to wigs, piety to collars, class to cloth. The line anticipates modern “performative” virtue without the jargon. Dress becomes a technology of credibility, and Dickens reminds us how cheaply credibility can be bought, rented, or faked - especially by people who can already afford the waistcoat.
The phrasing does double work. “Sometimes” gives him plausible deniability, the authorial shrug that makes the indictment sharper: he isn’t claiming every clergyman is a fraud or every poor man is pure, only that the public’s moral eyesight is famously bad. “Some people imagine” points outward to the reader’s neighbors while quietly implicating the reader. If you’ve ever trusted a uniform, a frock coat, a respectable silhouette, Dickens suggests you’ve participated in the con.
Contextually, it fits his broader project: prying open Victorian respectability to show the rot and the tenderness underneath. In Dickens’s world, institutions often outsource ethics to appearances - law to wigs, piety to collars, class to cloth. The line anticipates modern “performative” virtue without the jargon. Dress becomes a technology of credibility, and Dickens reminds us how cheaply credibility can be bought, rented, or faked - especially by people who can already afford the waistcoat.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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