HKB
1 passages · search this phrase →
Often appears with: the city and urban life · social hierarchy · rank, class, and social order · labor, wages, and the division of work · division of labor · contempt and admiration
Usually: argument (1) · curiosity (1) · wonder (1)
Johnson elaborates on London’s “secret concatenation of society,” claiming that even low occupations link rich and poor, and that labor prevents mortifying uselessness.
and superfluous kind, which nothing but experience could evince possible to be prosecuted with advantage, and which, as the world might easily want, it could scarcely be expected to encourage. But so it is, that custom, curiosity, or wantonness, supplies every art with patrons, and finds purchasers for every manufacture; the world is so adjusted, that not only bread, but riches may be obtained without great abilitie…