Success Quote by Lewis Tappan

Even in eight words, Tappan exposes a whole economy of moral distance. "Curiosity" is the key tell: not concern, not outrage, not solidarity, but the casual itch of spectatorship. The phrase "appears to be" adds a thin veneer of observation, as if the speaker is merely taking the temperature of a crowd rather than participating in its appetite. And "unabated" gives that appetite momentum and stamina. This isn't a one-off gawking; it's sustained demand.

Context matters because Lewis Tappan wasn't a novelist chasing grit; he was a businessman and, famously, an abolitionist organizer who understood how public attention could be weaponized for reform. Read that way, the line works like a cold ledger entry that doubles as indictment: people will show up, reliably, to look at confined human beings. The subtext isn't just that prisoners are being punished; it's that the public treats punishment as a form of entertainment, a civic outing, a kind of moral tourism. Tappan's language refuses to romanticize the scene. He doesn't describe suffering directly. He tracks the crowd.

There's also an uncomfortable mirror here for a commercial society. A businessman notices demand curves. "Curiosity" becomes a market force; "prisoners" become the product. Whether he meant it as critique, reportage, or both, the sentence captures how easily a culture can turn confinement into content - and how reform efforts must reckon not only with laws and institutions, but with the audience that keeps buying tickets.