Time & Perspective Quote by Douglas William Jerrold

Jerrold’s jab lands because it dresses up a moral warning as a tailor’s aside. “Fortunes made in no time” conjures the intoxicating speed of speculation, inheritance windfalls, and the era’s new money churn; then he undercuts it with the most deflating comparison possible: a rushed shirt. The metaphor is almost insultingly domestic, which is the point. He drags high finance down to the level of flimsy stitching, where shortcuts show and seams split.

The line’s bite comes from its casual probability: “it’s ten to one.” Jerrold isn’t preaching virtue; he’s betting against you. That gambler’s register matters in a 19th-century Britain newly obsessed with markets, credit, and the promise that a clever man could sprint past class boundaries. Jerrold, a dramatist steeped in comic timing, turns that promise into a costume drama: sudden wealth is wardrobe, not character. It can make you look like someone, briefly, until the fabric betrays you at the shoulder.

“Hanging long together” does double duty. It’s literally about clothes holding their shape, and socially about a person holding their place. The subtext is sharp and slightly cruel: people who rise too fast often lack the social tailoring - habits, networks, restraint - that keeps status from slipping. Jerrold’s intent isn’t to romanticize poverty; it’s to mock the era’s faith in speed as a substitute for solidity. The joke is that the shirt fails where it counts: not on the rack, but in public, at the moment you need it to hold.