Nooks and Corners: being the companion volume to 'From Kitchen to Garret' — John Shaqi
Nooks and Corners: being the companion volume to 'From Kitchen to Garret'Panton, J. E. (Jane Ellen)
General
Nooks and Corners: being the companion volume to 'From Kitchen to Garret'
Panton, J. E. (Jane Ellen)
Home economics
Therefore, if you have begun your residence in the suburbs, and have a
nice church, a nice doctor, and nice friends, stay there; you don’t know
how deeply your roots are planted until you begin to drag them up. If
you are a Londoner, on no account be persuaded by artistic accounts of
country delights to leave your beloved pavements and the exquisite
freedom of a town life and surroundings: and if you are born and have
lived among cabbages and roses--if you love the country, and can
interest yourself mildly in the continual changes that are going on
around you in your neighbours’ houses and the cottages round
about--remain there; and be thankful for tastes which are innocent if
they are circumscribed, and often result in a far nobler life than that
made up mostly from excitement and dissipation; because anyone who can
and will live cheerfully in the country, making work for the labourer,
and employing folk in pure air, and in decent habitations, does much
more for the human race than he wots of, and should be encouraged to do
so in any manner that one possibly can.
I am often being told that the country is a far cheaper place to live in
than London; but I have tried both, and I know better. In the first
place, in London you can do precisely what you like, and, provided your
likes are not openly eccentric, no one will interfere with you. You can
have ten friends or ten thousand acquaintances. You may wear one dress
as long as it will hold together, and no one will doubt your
capabilities of being respectable because of your shabby attire. You may
get up when you like, go to bed when you like, need not give to any
charity if you are not charitably disposed, need not keep a carriage,
because you can at any moment hail any vehicle, and go anywhere you
like; and, above all, can be so easily amused, and at so cheap a rate,
that one need hardly put down ‘amusements’ in our schedule at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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