Just know how bad money can be
I don't know where this originated but I've been seeing various posts across my reading list alluding to someone apparently going on about The Poor spending money on stuff that's not totally necessary - rather than putting anything left over from the necessities into a savings account, presumably.
This makes me somewhat incoherently raging WTF.
Okay, I get a very strong impression that it is a general thing among people to criticise the spending habits and financial management of others, or at least indicate that one would not do things that way oneself. And of course whatever you do with your money there are lots of class and status markers involved - the C18th-C19th code of an officer and gentlemen that meant you were supposed to pay up your gambling debts on the nail, but could let your tailors' bills run on until the tailors were come to ruin. There was a discussion some while ago on the trennels in which many people were quite bewildered about the social and financial status of the Marlow family, on the one hand clad in handmedowns and far from well-off, yet going to a private school and suddenly buying horses on a whim.
But, still there is that specific longstanding thing about if you're poor you're not supposed to have any fun.
Goodness knows I do not have a lot of time for Dickens, but in one of his books - here it is, in Little Dorrit - through the mouth of one of the characters he has this to say:
[T]hat man (Mr Plornish gave it as his decided belief) know'd well that he was poor somehow or another, and you couldn't talk it out of him, no more than you could talk Beef into him. Then you see, some people as was better off said, and a good many such people lived pretty close up to the mark themselves if not beyond it so he'd heerd, that they was 'improvident' (that was the favourite word) down the Yard. For instance, if they see a man with his wife and children going to Hampton Court in a Wan, perhaps once in a year, they says, 'Hallo! I thought you was poor, my improvident friend!' Why, Lord, how hard it was upon a man! What was a man to do? He couldn't go mollancholy mad, and even if he did, you wouldn't be the better for it. In Mr Plornish's judgment you would be the worse for it. Yet you seemed to want to make a man mollancholy mad. You was always at it-if not with your right hand, with your left. What was they a doing in the Yard? Why, take a look at 'em and see. There was the girls and their mothers a working at their sewing, or their shoe-binding, or their trimming, or their waistcoat making, day and night and night and day, and not more than able to keep body and soul together after all-often not so much.
I would also like to invoke (yet again) the following conversation attributed to Dr Johnson and another:
What signifies," said someone, "giving a half pence to common beggars? They only lay it out on gin and tabacco".
[He responded]
"And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence?"
If The Poor (whoever they are, because I very much doubt they are a monolithic entity) happen to have a little spare cash or come into a small windfall, is it going to be of any particular long-term benefit to them not to enjoy it while they can? And if your uncle dies and leaves you his little donkey-shay, I suppose you are supposed to sell it and use the money in some serious and unfun way, rather than knockin' em in the Old Kent Road when you drive along it.
It all seems to come back to the unhelpful deserving/undeserving thing that I did a rant about in the context of healthcare reform, where some people seemed to be arguing that if people couldn't afford health insurance and hadn't managed to get a job with benefits they somehow were undeserving of healthcare.
And somehow, to need something is to be undeserving of it.
This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1282884.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.