Marriage Quote by Thomas de Quincey

De Quincey makes morality sound like overhead: a luxury item you can barely justify on the balance sheet of ordinary ambition. The joke lands because he borrows the language of domestic respectability (a wife) and upper-class display (a carriage) to measure something supposedly priceless - conscience - in blunt, transactional terms. It is an indictment disguised as a cost comparison, the kind of line that smiles while it cuts.

The specific intent is less to sneer at marriage than to expose how easily people treat ethics as optional equipment. A spouse or a carriage may drain your purse, but a conscience drains your options. It slows the deal, complicates the climb, forces you to carry the full weight of what you are doing to others. That is the "encumbrance": not guilt as feeling, but conscience as constraint.

The subtext is darker than the wit. De Quincey implies a world where getting ahead often requires a practiced insensitivity; in many professions, the person who refuses to look away pays in lost opportunities, not just sleepless nights. His phrasing also toys with class: only those who can afford it keep a conscience intact, while everyone else is nudged toward moral corner-cutting as a survival strategy.

Context matters: writing in the early 19th century, de Quincey watched a Britain remade by commerce, industrialization, and status anxiety. The line reads like a compact critique of a society that prices everything, even virtue, and then wonders why so many people shop for a cheaper self.