With all due respect to our porcine friends, I loved this line by the competent, demanding and house proud farmer’s wife, Mrs Poyser, who keeps her 18th century home and dairy buildings spic and span, laying into the housemaids for their slatternly ways.  However, once she employs them, she soon knocks them into shape so they almost live up to her exacting standards.

This pithy, piggy disparagement is preceded by the lament, ‘I never had a gell come into my house as seemed to know what cleaning was’.

‘I think people live like pigs, for my part’.

Source: George Eliot, Adam Bede (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 (1859)), p. 119

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