Sweets - Robert Lynd

 Introduction

Robert Wilson Lynd (1879 – 1949) is an Irish essayist and journalist. He writes under the pseudonym “YY” in journals like The New Statesman and Nation. His essays have somber humour and satirical remarks. His prose essay “Sweets” explores children’s fondness for different flavoured chocolates and sweets.

Sweets as Exchange

The essay begins with the depressing statistics of spending fifty million pounds every year on chocolates and confectionery in Great Britain. The city child has lost Wordsworthian delights of witnessing the variety of flowers and animals whereas as an exchange he has the riches of the sweet shop.  

Sweets as Expensive Luxury

It is hard to trace when the social history of the democratization of sweets began. Sweets hadn’t been the universal food of children till the eighteenth century when sugar had been an expensive thing. Lynd doubts whether poor children had ever tasted sweets like marchpane, kissing comfits referred to in Shakespeare’s plays.

                                                                     

                        Marchpane                                        Kissing Comfits

                                                                  

Sweets for Cure

Until the nineteenth century, sweet-making was in the hands of druggists. It implies that the ancestors of all present delicacies are that had medical utility, the cough-drop. The chemist remains half a confectioner with his liquorice, pastilles and marshmallows. What once done for utility is now done for pleasure. The child of today sucks jujube for pure joy which was sucked two hundred years ago as a cure.

Pastille                   Marshmallow	Liquorice                Jujube

Sweets for Pleasure

            It is highly fortunate that doctors once thought that sweets were good for us. Sweets have made a greater contribution to the physical happiness of mankind. The sight of the bottles in the sweet shop stirs the imagination of the infant. Lynd in a tone of exaggeration says that the sweets in each box would compete with their rivals to be the choice of the boy who enters the shop with a penny whereas he experiences only agonies of indecision among bull’s-eye, brandy balls, pear-drops and barley-sugar. Children want to taste all the sweets in the shop. They cannot decide which sweet to buy and which to reject.

bull’s-eye	pear-drops
brandy balls	barley-sugar

Greed for Sweets

All the jars of sweets fill him with an ache of longing from throat to stomach. “Great are the joys of greed but great are its sufferings.” Lynd says that the boy could make his choice easier if he has a sister to share his sweets who dislikes, for instance, coco-nut chips.  Humourously, he says that if that boy is either selfish or unselfish, he would buy coconut chips, so he need not share them. Lynd declares that such greed is to be blamed, but the pain of sharing almond rock with many others is extremely bitter. Hence the author remarks that the pang of desire and sharing stops children from eating sweets with others.

 

             Almond Rock                             Coco-nut Chips      

Sweets not for Sharing       

A boy who never offers a sweet to a friend is regarded as one who would live to be hanged. On the other hand, a well-mean boy has bought a packet of sweets with a benevolent intention of sharing it with others; but when he gets home, he has discovered that the packet is finished. The writer too found it difficult to get home with a box of nougat. The silver wrapper of nougat tempted him to open the box and made him to taste a piece. And he felt that the worst of nougat is that one could not stop eating it. The writer says that if his home had not been so far from the shop, the others would have considered him a saint for not touching nougat.

  Nougats

Features of Love of Sweets

1.     Declines with age

If no one under thirty were allowed to eat sweets, half of the confectionery would go out of business. Hardly a middle-aged man look into a confectioner’s window and gaze at a sweet shop as if it is a vision of Heaven. But the author knows a man who eats chocolates while he is drinking and many women who nibble sweets after dinner. However, none of them get excited like a child. Neither an adult would shout for getting a sugar mouse nor would get into raptures for seeing a chocolate Easter egg with a sugar hen. No friend would thank for passing a bagful of acid drops

Sugar Mouse               Acid Drops	Easter Egg with a Sugar Hen

2.     Indiscriminateness

     A true sweet-eater is an almost indiscriminate love of sweets. He loves everything called sweets from the despised acid drop to the delicious sugar almond, whether humbug or nougatine, butter-scotch or liquorice laces, either a peppermint drop or aniseed balls. The child has preferences among sweets but no hatred.

Sugar Almond	Humbug
Butter-Scotch	Licorice Strings
Nougatine	Aniseed balls             Peppermint Drops

Favourite Sweets of the Author

            Lynd’s preference was almond rock. He also wonders at a sweet which turns colour as one sucks it. He enjoys its miraculous transformation by taking it out of mouth for a while.   He questions whether the confectioners stop producing it considering the hygiene. Next, he mentions a flat honey-flavoured sweet in which a three penny was sandwiched between the two. The infants of the town bought shillings-worth chocolate with an unearned three pence. This was regarded as dangerous incitement of gambling and was stopped. Lynd says that the sweet never tasted quite the same afterward.  

Source of Pleasure

            Lynd concludes his essay by saying that the adult’s tastes for tobacco, beer, wine, and whisky are not sufficient compensation for the loss of the appetite for sweets. Because,

·       An adult does not long for all the brands of cigarettes in the shop.

·       He does not consider the packet of cigarettes as a treasure.

·       He smokes not much for pleasure but for the purpose of avoiding the discomfort of not smoking.

·       Wine experts may have the excitement of a child eating sweets but they have lost the indisriminateness of enjoyment. They discriminate the good and bad wine.

On the other hand, the child lives happily in a world in which greed and not fastidiousness are the source of pleasure. He never heard of bad sweets and loves all sweets with the large-heartedness with which it loves all stars and fireworks.