Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Hood

Novelty is the public’s sugar hit, and Hood knows it well enough to repeat the word like a drumbeat. The line plays as a joke, but it’s a diagnosis: audiences don’t just enjoy newness, they demand it with the impatience of a crowd that thinks it’s entitled to surprise on schedule. By listing “three things” and delivering the same item three times, Hood uses the oldest comic trick in the book to expose a newer kind of cultural reflex - the way appetite replaces judgment. The gag is the argument.

The subtext is less about taste than about power. “The public” becomes a single organism, noisy and predictable, and the artist is implicitly cast as both supplier and hostage. That “clamor” matters: it’s not quiet preference, it’s pressure. Novelty isn’t framed as discovery or innovation; it’s a churn, a market logic that turns art into a perishable good. If you don’t refresh, you rot.

Context sharpens the bite. Hood wrote during the rapid expansion of mass print culture - magazines, serials, caricature, an attention economy before the term existed. In that world, repetition is risky unless it’s packaged as new; even sincerity has to compete with spectacle. Hood, a poet and humorist who worked amid London’s commercial publishing machine, isn’t piously lamenting modernity so much as admitting the rules of the game. The line flatters no one: the crowd is fickle, creators are cornered, and novelty is the one stable currency in a culture addicted to change.