Aging & Wisdom Quote by Charles Dickens

Dickens lands the punchline like a novelist who’s watched heroism get replaced by paperwork. “The age of chivalry is past” sounds at first like a grand lament for vanished romance, a Carlylean sigh for knights and honor. Then he swivels: “Bores have succeeded to dragons.” The monster isn’t slain; it’s downgraded. Whatever menace once stalked the imagination has been replaced by something deadlier in daily life: the dull, self-satisfied talker, the petty official, the moralizing busybody. Dragons at least confer dignity on their victims. Bores don’t even grant you the drama of being threatened; they smother you with tedium and sanctimony.

The line works because it treats modernity as an anticlimax. Dickens isn’t just nostalgic for jousts. He’s diagnosing a cultural shift in what society fears and what it rewards. Chivalry implies codes, risk, physical courage, and a certain theatrical public ethic. The bore implies a world run by propriety, small rules, and people who mistake their own respectability for virtue. In Victorian Britain - with its swelling bureaucracy, industrial discipline, and sermonizing middle-class confidence - that’s not a minor insult; it’s a map of power.

There’s also a sly meta-joke: Dickens made a career out of turning “bores” into villains worth reading about, extracting narrative heat from social coldness. Dragons are easy to spot. Bores blend in, thrive in committees, and call themselves “reasonable.” That’s the real horror: the enchantment didn’t die in battle; it was talked to death.