Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Dickens

Dickens lands the punch with bookkeeping language: prejudice has a "pocket", and society keeps slipping coins into it. In a single clause he turns bias into something both petty and structural, a quiet form of bribery that rewards the already-whole and penalizes the visibly marked. "He had but one eye" is blunt, almost bureaucratic, as if disability can be summarized like an inventory loss. Then comes the sharper move: it isn't the missing eye that dooms him; it's the market logic around it. Prejudice "runs in favor of two" the way odds favor the house.

The subtext is classic Dickens: a supposedly moral society that treats misfortune as a character flaw. He is less interested in the medical fact than in the social arithmetic it triggers. Two eyes becomes shorthand for credibility, employability, even deservingness. The line exposes how quickly Victorian respectability collapses into optics in the literal sense: the body must look right to be read as right.

Contextually, Dickens wrote in a London where industrial accidents, illness, and poverty produced visible impairment at scale, while institutions and employers sorted people with ruthless efficiency. His fiction repeatedly attacks that sorting impulse, especially when it masquerades as common sense. The wit here is acidic: by framing discrimination as a pocketbook advantage, Dickens suggests prejudice isn't just ignorance; it's an economy. People invest in it because it pays out in status, access, and the comforting illusion that the unlucky earned their bad luck.