"Smatterers in learning are the most opinionated"
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Richardson’s barb lands because it targets a recognizable social type: the person who’s skimmed just enough to confuse exposure with mastery, then turns that thin veneer into swagger. “Smatterers” is doing the real work here. It’s not ignorance he’s condemning, but the half-knowledge that breeds certainty. A novice can be cautious; an expert can be humble; the smatterer, intoxicated by a few new terms and citations, has the least reason to be sure and the most appetite to perform surety.
The line also reads as a quiet class critique. In Richardson’s 18th-century Britain, literacy and print culture were exploding: pamphlets, periodicals, coffeehouse debate. Learning was becoming portable, even fashionable, and with that came a new kind of cultural climber who could “talk book” without being formed by it. Richardson, a moral novelist obsessed with character as revealed through speech and correspondence, would have seen this as a moral problem as much as an intellectual one: opinionatedness isn’t just a cognitive error, it’s a posture, a social bid for authority.
The subtext is political, too. An “opinionated” public can be manipulated; loud conviction travels faster than slow understanding. Richardson’s phrasing preempts modern anxieties about hot takes and pseudo-expertise, but it’s not merely a complaint about noise. It’s a warning about how shallow learning can counterfeit virtue: it borrows the prestige of knowledge while skipping the discipline that should make knowledge responsible.
The line also reads as a quiet class critique. In Richardson’s 18th-century Britain, literacy and print culture were exploding: pamphlets, periodicals, coffeehouse debate. Learning was becoming portable, even fashionable, and with that came a new kind of cultural climber who could “talk book” without being formed by it. Richardson, a moral novelist obsessed with character as revealed through speech and correspondence, would have seen this as a moral problem as much as an intellectual one: opinionatedness isn’t just a cognitive error, it’s a posture, a social bid for authority.
The subtext is political, too. An “opinionated” public can be manipulated; loud conviction travels faster than slow understanding. Richardson’s phrasing preempts modern anxieties about hot takes and pseudo-expertise, but it’s not merely a complaint about noise. It’s a warning about how shallow learning can counterfeit virtue: it borrows the prestige of knowledge while skipping the discipline that should make knowledge responsible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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