England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Families -- Fiction; Stepmothers -- Fiction
This want of pocket-money is the grand drawback to the education or no
education of the youths of the nineteenth century. So long as they can
have enough of that, what a pleasant life is theirs! For it does you no
particular harm to be supposed to be “working for an examination” so
long as you don’t work much for that, and are exempted, for the sake of
it, from all other kinds of work. Boating and cricketing and running
races, and every kind of exercise, are known now-a-days to be compatible
with the hardest mental labour, and he is a stern parent indeed who
interferes with his son’s training in such essential points. But all
these delights are more or less dependent upon pocket-money. Law, whose
bread and cheese had never yet failed, and whose conscience was not
active, would have found his life quite pleasant but for that; but it
was hard upon him not to be able to pay his subscription to a cricket
club, nor the hire of a boat, nor even the entry money for a race,
though that was sure to repay itself abundantly if he won it. This was
very hard upon him, and often stimulated him to the length of a
resolution that he would work to-morrow and conquer all his subjects,
and “scrape through” by sheer force of will, so as to have an income of
his own. But the habit of idleness unfortunately overcame the resolution
next morning, which was a pity, and Law “loafed,” as he himself said,
not being able to afford to “do anything.” It is needless to inform the
instructed who have to do with youths working for examinations, that it
is cricket and boating and athletics these heroes mean when they talk of
“having something to do.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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