In the paragraph below from Virginia Woolf's "Jacob's Room" (1922), Jacob Flanders begins with the "modern invention" of depression and then touches rapidly on modes of understanding available to him around 1910: religion (belief), genealogy ("our fathers"), journalism ("the Daily Mail"), politics (Parliament), depression again ("the black waters"), psychology ("happiness and unhappiness"), sociology (respectability and its counterpart, poverty), imperialism (the British Empire), and colonialism ("Home Rule" and Ireland). The final question returns to one part of journalism: the opinion pages, where newspapers take positions, filled with the "fine speeches" or articles of pundits (a word that, because of Empire, entered 19th-century English from Hindi, where it means "priest", "scholar", or "teacher"). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 7 October 2025)

This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern invention. perhaps, as Cruttendon said, we do not believe enough. Our fathers at any rate had something to demolish. So have we for the matter of that, thought Jacob, crumpling the Daily Mail in his hand. He would go into Parliament and make fine speeches—but what use are fine speeches and Parliament, one you surrender an inch to the black waters? Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins—of happiness and unhappiness. That respectability and evening parties where one has to dress, and wretched slums at the back of Gray’s Inn—something solid, immovable, and grotesque—is at the back of it, Jacob thought probable. But then there was the British Empire which was beginning to puzzle him; nor was he altogether in favour of giving Home Rule to Ireland. What did the Daily Mail say about that?