Wealth & Money Quote by William Makepeace Thackeray

Thackeray’s line lands like a friendly tip from a man who’s watched society perform its pieties in public and its transactions in private. “Remember” is doing sly work: it’s the tone of worldly counsel, the kind passed along in drawing rooms where morality is recited and money is quietly counted. The provocation is the apparent pragmatism. If marrying a rich woman is “as easy” as marrying a poor one, then the usual Victorian alibi for marrying within one’s means - that love, duty, or class propriety “made” it so - collapses into a choice. And once it’s a choice, the moral veneer looks thin.

The subtext is less about women than about the men who treat marriage as logistics. Thackeray’s comic cruelty is in how he reduces a sacred institution to a flat comparison, as if spouses are interchangeable units differentiated only by net worth. The line also needles class anxiety: the fantasy that wealth is inaccessible, that “good matches” require special genius, pedigree, or romantic fate. No, he implies: the same social scripts, courtship rituals, and self-justifying narratives will serve you either way.

Context matters: Thackeray’s fiction (Vanity Fair especially) is obsessed with the marketplace of respectability, where sentiment is a currency that makes cash seem tasteful. The joke isn’t merely that people are greedy; it’s that they’re greedy and still insist on being seen as honorable. That hypocrisy is the real target, and the line hits because it refuses to let anyone pretend otherwise.