Essays; “Debtors’ Prisons (1)” by Samuel Johnson (30/142)
In an effort to educate myself, I am reading The Oxford Book of Essays, chosen and edited by John Gross. [copies for sale here] There’s 142 of the blighters, so it will take me all year. To make this “stick” I am going to blog each essay.
This essay is online
Who was the author:
Samuel Johnson (18 September [O.S. 7 September] 1709 – 13 December 1784), often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history”.[1]
What happened the year they were born (and the C02 ppm): 1709
The Big Events they were alive for: Seven Years war, capture of India, scientific developments.
What happened in the year they died (and the C02 ppm): 1784
My awareness of/appreciation of this author (if any): I love him – Rasselas, the “What Have ye Done?” essay. Robbie Coltrane’s thing in Black Adder 3. I think I am going to read that collected volume
What’s the essay?
The essay is called “Debtor’s Prisons.” It’s 3 pages long. For me, the key take-aways were Samuel Johnson was all for penal reform
Best line(s)
“The prosperity of a people is proportionate to the number of hands and minds usefully employed. To the community, sedition is a fever, corruption is a gangrene, and idleness an atrophy. Whatever body, and whatever society, wastes more than it acquires, must gradually decay; and every being that continues to be fed, and ceases to labour, takes away something from the publick stock.”
Starts well, but becomes fairly eugenicist etc…
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“The rest are imprisoned by the wantonness of pride, the malignity of revenge, or the acrimony of disappointed expectation.”
Comment: “the acrimony of disappointed expectation” – what a line!
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“Those who made the laws have apparently supposed, that every deficiency of payment is the crime of the debtor. But the truth is, that the creditor always shares the act, and often more than shares the guilt, of improper trust. It seldom happens that any man imprisons another but for debts which he suffered to be contracted in hope of advantage to himself, and for bargains in which he proportioned his profit to his own opinion of the hazard; and there is no reason why one should punish the other for a contract in which both concurred.”
Comment: Robert Sapolsky on how we will think of various behaviours in the future, based on how we have made some progress on – for example – witchcraft etc
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It is vain to continue an institution, which experience shows to be ineffectual.
Stuff I had to look up
xx
Stuff worth thinking about.
xx
Stuff to look up
xxx
Connects to (watch this space – if there are later essays that resonate with this one, I’ll come back and add a link to the post for that essay).
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Title Essays; “Debtors’ Prisons (2)” by Samuel Johnson (31/142)
In an effort to educate myself, I am reading The Oxford Book of Essays, chosen and edited by John Gross. [copies for sale here] There’s 142 of the blighters, so it will take me all year. To make this “stick” I am going to blog each essay.
This essay is online
Who was the author:
Samuel Johnson (18 September [O.S. 7 September] 1709 – 13 December 1784), often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history”.[1]
What happened the year they were born (and the C02 ppm): 1709
The Big Events they were alive for: xx
What happened in the year they died (and the C02 ppm): 1784
My awareness of/appreciation of this author (if any): I love him – Rasselas, the “What Have ye Done?” essay. Robbie Coltrane’s thing in Black Adder 3.
What’s the essay?
The essay is called “xxxx.” It’s x pages long. For me, the key take-aways were…
Best line(s)
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“We often look with indifference on the successive parts of that, which, if the whole were seen together, would shake us with emotion. ”
Comment: as per boiling frog
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“I am afraid that those who are best acquainted with the state of our prisons will confess that my conjecture is too near the truth, when I suppose that the corrosion of resentment, the heaviness of sorrow, the corruption of confined air, the want of exercise, and sometimes of food, the contagion of diseases, from which there is no retreat, and the severity of tyrants, against whom there can be no resistance, and all the complicated horrours of a prison, put an end every year to the life of one in four of those that are shut up from the common comforts of human life.”
Comment:
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“The lewd inflame the lewd, the audacious harden the audacious. Every one fortifies himself as he can against his own sensibility, endeavours to practise on others the arts which are practised on himself; and gains the kindness of his associates by similitude of manners.”
Comment: Matthew Effect/positive feedback loop for assholes. See also selection pressures.
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“ If there are any made so obdurate by avarice or cruelty, as to revolve these consequences without dread or pity, I must leave them to be awakened by some other power, for I write only to human beings.”
Comment: early version of “if you need telling that humans need respect, then I can’t help you”
Stuff I had to look up
xx
Stuff worth thinking about.
xx
Stuff to look up
xxx
Connects to (watch this space – if there are later essays that resonate with this one, I’ll come back and add a link to the post for that essay).
marchudson.net 
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