Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph C. Lincoln

Nostalgia is doing double duty here: it sets the scene and slips in a brag without sounding like one. Joseph C. Lincoln frames his early success in an era-marker - "when everyone rode a bicycle" - a detail that instantly dates the story and, more importantly, flatters the reader's sense of a simpler, more legible public life. The bicycle isn’t just a prop; it’s shorthand for a mass culture that still feels quaint, before the car and radio and then television splintered attention. He’s invoking a time when "everyone" could be imagined as sharing the same streets, the same pace, the same weekly habits.

Then he drops the number: "over one hundred and twenty-five thousand weekly". Precision is the point. It gives the sentence the texture of record-keeping, like a memoirist who wants you to trust his memory because he can produce receipts. But the next move is even shrewder: he downshifts into understatement - "a fairly large public" - as if he’s modestly surprised that his "verses and illustrations" traveled that far.

The subtext is about authorship as visibility, not just craft. Lincoln is quietly arguing that talent mattered, sure, but distribution was destiny. A fat-circulation journal could turn small, local work into recognizable cultural property. The intent reads like a reminder from the print age: fame used to be a pipeline, not an algorithm - and the public used to gather in one place long enough for a writer to become "known" in the first place.