Science & Tech Quote by Charles Dickens

Dickens does what he does best here: he yanks the grand idea of "Man" off its pedestal and drops it into the jittery, overtaxed body. The repetition of "the nerves, the nerves" is not just emphasis; it mimics the very condition he’s describing, that circular, self-feeding panic where awareness becomes its own tremor. By calling the human being a "machine", he borrows the Industrial Age’s favorite metaphor, then punctures it with "mysteries" - a reminder that however much Victorian Britain loved gears, systems, and progress narratives, the inner life stayed stubbornly unreadable.

The intent is equal parts compassion and indictment. Dickens isn’t marveling at human fragility from a safe distance; the "poor creatures that we are!" folds narrator and reader into the same cramped room. It’s a democratizing move: nervous collapse isn’t a personal moral failure, it’s a feature of being alive in a world that asks too much. That phrase "the little that unhinges it" carries a sharp social critique: the breaking point isn’t always tragedy or catastrophe, but a minor humiliation, an unpaid bill, a bureaucratic coldness, a family slight - the everyday abrasions Dickens loved to expose as quietly violent.

Contextually, Dickens wrote in an era newly obsessed with nerves as both medical and cultural concept, when modern life seemed to produce new kinds of strain. The line’s power is how it makes that strain feel immediate: the body as mechanism, the mind as mystery, and civilization as the persistent thumb pressing on the weakest spring.