Life & Wisdom Quote by William R. Alger

Flattery this extravagant is less about dentistry than dominance. Alger’s line takes a familiar Victorian move - piling up precious objects to measure a man’s charms - then pushes it into a near-comic extreme: pearls, the classic shorthand for purity and value, are made to look dingy beside a smile. The image works because it steals the prestige of luxury goods and reroutes it into the body. Wealth becomes incidental; the person outshines the commodity.

The specific intent is courtly praise with a competitive edge. Pearls aren’t merely compared to teeth; they’re demoted by them. That “even” is doing heavy lifting, signaling that the speaker has already climbed a ladder of superlatives and is still not satisfied. It’s admiration as escalation, the rhetoric of someone trying to overwhelm the listener into agreement.

Subtextually, the line reveals a culture obsessed with legibility: character read on the surface, virtue inferred from brightness. In the 19th century, whiteness wasn’t just aesthetic; it indexed health, refinement, and self-control. To claim teeth brighter than pearls is to claim an almost moral luminosity, a body that seems to advertise purity.

Context matters: Alger, a moralist and writer shaped by sentimental and devotional prose, trafficked in elevating imagery. This kind of metaphor belongs to a world where romance, religion, and respectability share a vocabulary of radiance. It also hints at the era’s discomfort with desire; you can eroticize a mouth by calling it “pearl-white” without sounding indecent. The line’s sweetness is strategic: it turns physical attraction into an acceptable kind of reverence.