"In London, before I set out, I had paid one shilling; another was now demanded, so that upon the whole, from London to Richmond, the passage in the stage costs just two shillings"
About this Quote
There is something almost mischievous in how Moritz frames travel not as romance or revelation, but as an invoice. The sentence marches forward with the steady, clipped logic of accounting: paid one shilling, another demanded, total two. It’s a deliberately unpoetic way to narrate motion, and that’s the point. By reducing the “passage” from London to Richmond to a clean sum, Moritz smuggles in a portrait of an England where experience is measured, priced, and collected in stages.
The phrasing “was now demanded” does quiet work. It casts the traveler as momentarily subject to a system that doesn’t negotiate; it simply calls in what’s owed. Moritz isn’t raging, he’s registering. That calmness carries the subtext: modern life doesn’t need to threaten you dramatically. It just itemizes you. Even the word “just” is sly. It signals modesty (two shillings isn’t ruinous), but also a faint incredulity at how neatly mobility has become a commodity.
Context matters: Moritz’s travel writing arrives in a late-18th-century world where Britain’s roads, coaches, and timetables were early proof of a commercial society running on schedules and small transactions. For a Continental observer, the stagecoach is not merely transport; it’s infrastructure as ideology. The quote works because it turns a tiny payment into a cultural tell: a country confident enough to make even movement feel like a regulated purchase, and a narrator sharp enough to let the arithmetic do the critique.
The phrasing “was now demanded” does quiet work. It casts the traveler as momentarily subject to a system that doesn’t negotiate; it simply calls in what’s owed. Moritz isn’t raging, he’s registering. That calmness carries the subtext: modern life doesn’t need to threaten you dramatically. It just itemizes you. Even the word “just” is sly. It signals modesty (two shillings isn’t ruinous), but also a faint incredulity at how neatly mobility has become a commodity.
Context matters: Moritz’s travel writing arrives in a late-18th-century world where Britain’s roads, coaches, and timetables were early proof of a commercial society running on schedules and small transactions. For a Continental observer, the stagecoach is not merely transport; it’s infrastructure as ideology. The quote works because it turns a tiny payment into a cultural tell: a country confident enough to make even movement feel like a regulated purchase, and a narrator sharp enough to let the arithmetic do the critique.
Quote Details
| Topic | Travel |
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