Free-riding - “Our Street”
Collectivism obstinately guarantees aggravating freeriding: “Once I put a bottle of pale brandy into that cupboard, of which you and I only have keys, and the liquor wasted and wasted away until it was all gone. You drank the whole of it, you wicked old woman. You a lady, indeed!” Mrs. Cammysole is an archetypal free-rider who exploitatively relishes the brandy that she did not procure with her money at Thackeray’s expense. The cupboard catalyses the free-riding upshot since it is generously accessed by both Thackeray and Mrs. Cammysole. Mrs. Cammysole blatantly misuses her standing as the landlady to cultivate her self-seeking individuality. Besides, communism smudges the hedge between seclusion and communalism occasioning idiosyncratic awkwardness.
Evidence - “On Being Found Out”
Thackeray foregrounds “On Being Found Out” in his personal and bygone familiarity: “Something had been stolen in the school that day; and Mr. Wiseacre having read in a book of an ingenious method of finding out a thief by making him put his hand into a sack (which, if guilty, the rogue would shirk from doing), all we boys were subjected to the trial. Goodness knows what the lost object was, or who stole it. We all had black hands to show the master. And the thief, whoever he was, was not Found Out that time.” Extracting of proof culpability is tantamount to ‘finding out’ the agent of a definite deed. Mr. Wiseacre engages what would be equivalent to Solomon-like astuteness if the excursion had segregated the culprit from the other guiltless boys.
