Reading don't pay

Grandfather Smallweed sits all day. Does he do anything while? Mr George wonders:

"And don't you occupy yourself at all?"

"I watch the fire — and the boiling and the roasting —"

"When there is any," says Mr George, with great expression.

"Just so. When there is any."

"Don't you read or get read to?"

The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. "No, no. We have never been readers in our family. It don't pay. Stuff. Idleness. Folly. No, no!"

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

Other Bleak House posts
At Peffer and Snagsby's
"It must be a strange state"