Samuel Johnson Quotes
Poverty has, in large cities, very different appearances; it is often concealed in splendour, and often in extravagance.
Johnson, Samuel. The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Vol. 2, Arthur Murphy, ed., Jones & Company, 1825, p. 312.
Referring to the urban poverty in mid-nineteenth century Spain.
Western populists were terribly suspicious of the cities. Note that the migration to cities was noticeable enough to be considered a problem. Better roads and the railroads made relocation easier.
Urbanization has often alarmed the power structure. Given the harsher form of urban poverty compared with rural poverty, it was hard for politicians to understand the draw of the cities. They did not then understand the value and importance of greater opportunity, greater privacy and anonymity, more choice and more de facto freedom. Bannerman and many others would have been totally surprised that in the second decade of the 21st century, more than half the people in the entire world were living in cities and suburbs.
Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. Religiously, he was a devout Anglican, and politically a committed Tory. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Johnson as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is the subject of James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, described by Walter Jackson Bate as "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature".
