Daily Inspiration Quote by George Meredith

Meredith’s line lands like a Victorian cocktail: dry, bracing, and designed to sting. “Civilized” pretends to be benevolent, but it’s a power word - a colonial verb smuggled into the domestic sphere. By casting “Man” as the self-appointed agent of refinement and “Woman” as the territory still to be tamed, Meredith exposes (and in places, arguably indulges) the era’s confidence that hierarchy equals progress. The jab is in the timing: the “last thing” suggests that after empire, industry, and the public world have been ordered to male specifications, the final project is the most intimate one - the shaping of female autonomy to fit a masculine idea of social order.

The subtext is double-edged. Read one way, it’s a critique of male presumption: men congratulate themselves on “civilizing” everything they touch, yet the household remains stubbornly unconquered because women are not raw material. Read another way, it flirts with the paternalism it names, implying women are an unfinished civilization waiting on male completion. That ambiguity is part of why it works: it dramatizes the Victorian tension between emergent feminist energies and an intellectual culture that often treated women’s emancipation as a thought experiment rather than a political fact.

Context matters. Meredith wrote in a period when the “Woman Question” was moving from salon debate to legislative and economic reality. The line compresses that cultural anxiety into a single, polished provocation: if men insist on being the authors of civilization, the last frontier is not a foreign shore, but the person across the table.