Life, 1896-05-14 · page 12 of 20
Life — May 14, 1896 — page 12: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# "The Blessings of Poverty" — Life Magazine Satire This is a humorous essay mocking the wealthy while celebrating poverty's supposed advantages. The author ironically argues that being poor is actually blessed—he has no property to worry about catching fire, no gout from rich foods, and no transportation accidents to fear. When a wealthy former schoolmate loses a fortune in a fire and gets hit by a carriage, the poor author simply walks calmly home untroubled. The accompanying cartoons satirize gender and class anxieties of the era. The top illustration mocks the "New Woman"—a figure referencing early 1900s feminism—suggesting men can't wear golf clothes without being mistaken for women in the new social order. The bottom sequential panels appear to reference children's nursery rhymes, possibly commenting on social chaos. The satire cuts both ways: praising poverty's freedom while implicitly criticizing wealthy anxiety and excess.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
*LIFE: THE BLESSINGS OF POVERTY. AM busy because I am poor. Sometimes I have thought I was poor because I was busy and hadn'ttime to get rich, butthe thought seems to lack coherence or something. Anyway Iam too busy to analyze it now. Someone asked me the otherjday if I worked onanempty stomach. I promptly replied that I did, because when my stom- ach was full I did not have to work. It is a great blessing to be a philosopher. It is also a great blessing to be poor. Aman I went toschool with when we were boys, but who is not acquainted with me now, was driving along the street the day before yesterday, in a three thousand dollar turn-out, when an alarm of fire was turned in from that part of the city where he owns about seven acres of property. He ordered his coachman to fly thither and the coachman flew accordingly until the carriage collided with a cart; one of the horses was crippled for life, the carriage was wrecked and my former schoolmate was rolled over in the street with a broken arm and bruises enough to paint a black and green poster with. When he regained his consciousness, he was informed that the fire had burned the entire insides out of a hundred thousand dol- lar business block he had just completed. I heard the same alarm of fire, but I walked calmly on to my boarding-house and was not troubled by my transportation facilities colliding with a cart. The other morning, as I sat atthe breakfast table, I read a story of the dreadful suffering of anepicurean millionaire with gout, and I looked at my breakfast as the landlady put it carefully down by my plate, and felt sorry that that suffering If a body meet a bods coming through the fangle LADIES CABIN To THE RIGHT. ae THEN MISS. STEP Livery. \ “THAT's THE WORST OF THIS ‘NEW WoMAN’ BusINEsS! A FELLAN 'T PUT ON HIS GOLF CLOTHES NOW WITHOUT BEING TAKEN FOR A GIRL.” millionaire could not change places with me for nineteen or twenty years. In matters of the heart, too, poverty is a remarkable comicbooks.com