An Iranian on the wireless was complaining that disqualification of presidential candidates had left voters with ‘Hobson’s choice’. No doubt this idiom was learnt from a careful teacher, but I wondered how many English people would use it or even know its meaning.
All Spectator readers do, of course. In the original Spectator for 10 October 1712, Richard Steele told how ‘Tobias Hobson’ a carrier of Cambridge, hired out horses but obliged each customer ‘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’. So Hobson’s choice came to mean ‘this or nothing’.
Steele was careless to call Hobson (1545–1631) ‘Tobias’, for his name was Thomas. Hobson’s choice naturally found a place in E. Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, a book that tells us what people thought was the case, rather than accurate facts.
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