Art & Creativity Quote by Joseph Howe

“Poverty of purse cannot exclude me” is the pivot: Howe takes a social disadvantage and flips it into a democratic claim. As a politician in a British North American colony where formal education and private libraries marked class, he’s staking out a kind of self-made authority. He doesn’t apologize for owning “very few” books; he reframes scarcity as freedom, replacing the gated bookshelf with “the world” as an open library.

The rhetoric is cunningly egalitarian. “Open to all” sounds like principle, but it’s also strategy: Howe is building credibility with people for whom culture often arrived as a sermon or a scold. He suggests knowledge is not a gentleman’s inheritance but a habit of attention. That’s why he talks about “amuse” before “instruct and improve.” He’s not performing piety; he’s admitting that curiosity usually starts as pleasure, and that entertainment is a legitimate doorway to civic intelligence.

The line about “the meanest and most paltry volume” carries a buried insult toward snobbery. He’s saying you can learn from cheap pamphlets, newspapers, even mediocre books - precisely the print ecosystem that powered 19th-century reform politics. Context matters: Howe was a newspaperman-turned-public figure, and this reads like a defense of public reading, public argument, and public life. It’s a manifesto for mental portability: when institutions exclude you, you turn the whole street into a syllabus.