The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

time’. This meant that paterfamilias went to sleep,
his wife knitted, and the daughters wished they
were dead or at Timbuktu. They were not allowed
to read, or to ‘1eave the room, because the theory
was that at that period their father conversed with
them, which must be a pleasure to all concerned.
With luck they ultimately married and had a chance
to inflict upon their children a youth as dismal as
their own had been. If they did not have luck, they
developed into old maids, perhaps ultimately into
decayed gentlewomen - a fate as horrible as any
that savages have bestowed upon their victims.
All this weight of boredom should be borne in
mind in estimating the world of a hundred years
ago, and when one goes further into the past the
boredom becomes still worse. Imagine the
monotony of winter in a mediaeval village. People
could not read or write, they had only candles to
give them light after dark, the smoke of their one
fire filled the only room that was not bitterly cold.
Roads were practically impassable, so that one
hardly ever saw anybody from another village. It