Inordinate Saving
Samuel Smiles warned that taking care of the pennies should not come before taking care of living.
1859
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Samuel Smiles warned that taking care of the pennies should not come before taking care of living.
1859
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859), like his later book Thrift (1875), urged readers to economise. He was not advocating penny-pinching, or becoming Ebenezer Scrooge. To him, thrift or economy was not really about saving money: it was about allocating money to things that matter, rather than things that don’t.
TO provide for others and for our own comfort and independence in old age, is honourable, and greatly to be commended; but to hoard for mere wealth’s sake is the characteristic of the narrow-souled and the miserly.
It is against the growth of this habit of inordinate saving that the wise man needs most carefully to guard himself: else, what in youth was simple economy may in old age grow into avarice, and what was a duty in the one case may become a vice in the other. It is the love of money not money itself which is “the root of evil,”* a love which narrows and contracts the soul, and closes it against generous life and action.
* See 1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” The Greek might be better rendered as “the love of money is the root of all manner of evil”.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.