Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Stuart Calverley

A Victorian compliment turns, in the final clause, into a neatly sharpened pin. Calverley opens with reverence: 69 years of marriage is “marvellous,” a word that signals social approval and a kind of public sainthood. Then he swerves: “It must be very inexpensive.” The joke isn’t just that romance is being priced out like a household bill; it’s the way the economic register humiliates the sentimental one. He performs admiration long enough to establish the expected tone, then cashes it out into thrift.

The intent is less anti-marriage than anti-sanctimony. In a culture that loved to moralize domestic stability, Calverley punctures the pious aura around lifelong coupling by treating it as an efficiency: one woman, one dowry, one set of in-laws, no costly resets. The laugh comes from the collision between what’s supposed to be priceless and what Victorian England was obsessed with measuring: respectability, property, and prudence.

The subtext is also quietly gendered. “Inexpensive” positions the wife as an ongoing expense item, a dependent cost rather than a co-author of the life. That’s the darker underside of the quip: it borrows the era’s casual assumptions about women as financial liabilities to make its point. Calverley, a poet with a satiric streak, knows exactly how brittle the marriage ideal is when you press it against money. The line works because it converts a revered narrative into bookkeeping in a single beat, exposing how quickly virtue gets mistaken for good accounting.