"The wretch who digs the mine for bread, or ploughs, that others may be fed, feels less fatigued than that decreed to him who cannot think or read"
About this Quote
A surprisingly sharp defense of mental life, delivered in the moralizing cadences of late-18th-century Britain. Hannah More sets up a provocation: the miner and the ploughman, figures of brutal physical exertion, are “less fatigued” than the person “decreed” to a life without literacy. The twist is the word decreed. This isn’t a natural condition; it’s a sentence handed down by custom, class, and policy. Illiteracy becomes not just hardship but a tool of governance.
More’s intent is double-edged. On one level, she’s making a philanthropic case for education, especially for the poor: reading and thinking aren’t luxuries but basic human equipment. On another level, she’s preserving the era’s social hierarchy even as she critiques its cruelties. Her reformist Christianity often aimed to “improve” the laboring classes morally as much as intellectually, offering literacy as discipline as well as liberation. The line quietly suggests that a mind left idle doesn’t stay neutral; it becomes vulnerable to despair, vice, or political agitation.
The subtext is that fatigue isn’t only muscular. There’s a psychic exhaustion in being locked out of meaning-making: no books, no self-articulation, no access to the arguments that shape your life. More’s couplet works because it smuggles a radical idea into a conservative form. It grants the poor an interiority that industrial society was busy ignoring, then indicts a system that treats that interiority as expendable.
More’s intent is double-edged. On one level, she’s making a philanthropic case for education, especially for the poor: reading and thinking aren’t luxuries but basic human equipment. On another level, she’s preserving the era’s social hierarchy even as she critiques its cruelties. Her reformist Christianity often aimed to “improve” the laboring classes morally as much as intellectually, offering literacy as discipline as well as liberation. The line quietly suggests that a mind left idle doesn’t stay neutral; it becomes vulnerable to despair, vice, or political agitation.
The subtext is that fatigue isn’t only muscular. There’s a psychic exhaustion in being locked out of meaning-making: no books, no self-articulation, no access to the arguments that shape your life. More’s couplet works because it smuggles a radical idea into a conservative form. It grants the poor an interiority that industrial society was busy ignoring, then indicts a system that treats that interiority as expendable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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