Life's Pleasures Quote by Douglas William Jerrold

Jerrold’s line flatters marriage with one hand and needles it with the other, the way a good dramatist does: by turning a “respectable” institution into a social scene you can taste, misread, and misbehave in. “Marriage is like wine” sounds, at first sip, like Victorian sentimentality. Then comes the twist: you can’t judge it “until the second glass.” The joke isn’t just about alcohol; it’s about exposure. The first glass is ceremony and surface manners - the carefully performed version of domestic life. The second is where inhibition loosens and truth leaks out.

It’s a remarkably compact piece of stagecraft. Jerrold, writing in an era that prized marital propriety while quietly tolerating marital misery, uses wine as a socially acceptable metaphor for what couldn’t be said too directly: marriage changes you, and not always for the better. A second glass can mean warmth, intimacy, and ease; it can also mean slurred honesty, rash decisions, and the realization that what looked “fine” at first is too sharp, too sweet, or simply not to your taste.

There’s also a sly class angle. Wine suggests a dinner table, not a tavern: this is critique aimed at polite society, delivered in their own idiom. Jerrold’s subtext is that marriage, like wine, is judged less by abstract ideals than by lived sensation - and by the moment when performance drops and consequence begins.