1629 portrait of Thomas Hobson, a man in early seventeenth-century dress
31 December 2020
Hobson’s choice is the doctrine of take it or leave it, a situation where one is given the choice between what is being proffered or nothing at all. The phrase dates to at least 1659, during which year it appears multiple times. One example is from a pamphlet on politics titled The Grand Concernments of England Ensured:
It is frivolous to think that the 14 in England, like little Babies, would be pleased with this Rattle, of Choosing; when it is evident it must be Hobsons choice, this or none; and as I have been cheated my self when a Boy, and thought it priviledge enough to choose, the Wags have cut the greatest piece of an Apple, and offered me the Remainder, and bid me take that or choose.
This instance tells us what Hobson’s choice is, but it doesn’t give a clue as to who Hobson was or why the choice is named for him. Fortunately, he was, in his day, a rather well-known person, at least among the educated elite of England. Thomas Hobson (c. 1544–1631) was a Cambridge innkeeper who also ran the post between Cambridge and London. When his horses weren’t being used for mail runs, he rented them to students, and as a result, pretty much every student who came through Cambridge during his lifetime had dealings with him. And upon his death, several students, including John Milton, wrote jocular poems as epitaphs for him. Milton’s two poems about him, “On the University Carrier” and “Another on the Same,” were published in 1640.
The choice comes into the picture because of Hobson’s method for renting his horses to students. His students, being young, preferred the fastest horses, and the horses, being rentals, were not treated particularly well by them. To avoid exhausting and ruining his best horses, Hobson instituted a rotation system, forcing the students to take the next horse in line or go without. Hobson’s system is recounted in a “letter” in the Spectator written by a Hezekiah Thrift, an obvious pseudonym, probably for either Joseph Addison or Richard Steele, the Spectator’s editors:
I shall conclude this discourse with an explanation of a proverb, which by vulgar error is taken and used when a man is reduced to an extremity, whereas the propriety of the maxim is to use it when you would say there is plenty, but you must make such a choice as not to hurt another who is to come after you.
Mr. Tobias Hobson, from whom we have the expression, was a very honourable man, for I shall ever call the man so who gets an estate honestly. Mr. Tobias Hobson was a carrier; and, being a man of great abilities and invention, and one that saw where there might good profit arise, though the duller men overlooked it, this ingenious man was the first in this island who let out hackney-horses. He lived in Cambridge; and, observing that the scholars rid hard, his manner was to keep a large stable of horses, with boots, bridles, and whips, to furnish the gentlemen at once, without going from college to college to borrow, as they have done since the death of this worthy man. I say, Mr. Hobson kept a stable of forty good cattle always ready and fit for travelling; but, when a man came for a horse, he was led into the stable, where there was great choice; but he obliged him to take the horse which stood next to the stable-door; so that every customer was alike well served according to his chance, and every horse ridden with the same justice; from whence it became a proverb, when what ought to be your election was forced upon you, to say, “Hobson's choice.”
Sources:
The Grand Concernments of England Ensured. London: 1659, 45. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Luxon, Thomas H. “On the University Carrier.” The John Milton Reading Room. Dartmouth College, 2020.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. choice, n.
The Spectator, 509, 14 October 1712. In A. Chalmers, The Spectator, vol. 7 of 8. New York: 1883, 206–07. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Image Source: National Portrait Gallery, London. Public domain in the United States as a mechanical reproduction of a work of art that was produced before 1925.