Daily Inspiration Quote by Douglas William Jerrold

Romantic love arrives here not as salvation but as a contagious childhood illness that adults are foolish enough to romanticize. Jerrold’s joke works because it violates the genre rules of love-talk: instead of metaphors that ennoble desire (flames, fate, poetry), he reaches for the ugly realism of infection. Measles is ordinary, socially unavoidable, and - crucially - more dangerous when you get it later. The comparison turns “late love” into a kind of biological misfortune: the heart isn’t ripening, it’s getting compromised.

As a mid-19th-century dramatist, Jerrold was writing for audiences steeped in sentimental ideals yet living in a world where disease wasn’t abstract. Measles wasn’t a metaphor; it was a household fear. That proximity gives the line its bite. The laugh carries a little shudder: everyone knows someone who didn’t “recover” cleanly. So the quip isn’t merely cynical; it’s calibrated to a public that understood risk, reputation, and the high cost of getting swept up.

The subtext is social as much as emotional. Late-in-life love threatens settled arrangements: marriages of convenience, careers, inheritances, the self-image you’ve spent decades defending. In youth, passion is expected, even excused as a phase. In age, it reads as lapse, scandal, or delusion - and it can hit harder because you have more to lose and fewer narratives that make it look noble.

Jerrold’s intent is to puncture romantic grandiosity with comic brutality: love, like illness, isn’t always chosen, and timing can turn a “blessing” into a complication.