Bruce Anderson

Some consumer advice: do not sell your daughter for a bottle of 90-year-old port

Oh, and don’t bother reading George Meredith

Novelist and poet George Meredith . Cartoon by 'Max', Vanity Fair, 1896 [Photo by Edward Gooch/Edward Gooch/Getty Images] 
issue 24 May 2014

Port, or Hermitage? This does not refer to personal consumption. I was trying to remember Meredith’s Egoist, in which one of the principal characters seeks to coerce his daughter into marriage, in order to have unlimited access to his putative son-in-law’s ancient wines. That could give rise to an interesting moral speculation.

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