[Ads-l] Hobson's choice, or Hudson's choice?

[Stephen Goranson]

"Hobson's choice" is widely understood to mean "take this or none," based on the practice of Thomas Hobson of Cambridge (1544-1631, though OED gives his first name as Tobias). Thomas Hobson was a mail carrier who also would rent horses and hackneys to University members, with the requirement that they take the next horse in rotation, rather than picking a favorite, or have no business with him. OED gives a first usage of the collocation from 1660. A text from 1649 includes the phrase "I had Hobson's choice, either be a Hobson or nothing." In 1659: "...everyone shall be free in Hobson's choise, to take, enjoy, or have what the Army will suffer us to take, enjoy, or have, or nothing?"[1]


The origin of "Hobson's choice" was challenged in 1883 by Edward Maunde Thompson, editing a 1617 letter by an agent of the East India Company during a failed attempt to set up a good trading relationship with Japan. Full text and context here [2]. Richard Cocks wrote "Once we are put to Hodgsons choise to take such privilegese as they will geve us, or else goe without." Essentially, the editor Thompson commented that Cocks could not have known of Hobson, so his usage was "almost conclusive against the usual explanation of the phrase" that was likely an "older popular saying" or proverb erroneously attached to Hobson.


In 1902 William Foster [3] of the India Office cited Thompson and two brief snippets of letters that led him to assert that the "original form of the name was Hodgson, Hodson, or Hudson." Any of those three, one unattested,...but not Hobson? From Richard Wickham, in Japan, 1614, "I would put him to Hudsons choice." Wickham, 1616, "I gave him good words and leave him to Hudsons choice." Foster does not tell us to whom Wickham wrote--namely to Richard Cocks. I owe this fact to Aliki-Anastasia Arkomani of the British Library, who informed me of the full publication of the letters in The English Factory in Japan 1613-1623, Anthony Farrington, ed. (1991 2 vols.). Cocks may have learned from Wickham; peruse Cocks' spellings. Who else was in their small company? Richard Hudson, son of the famous, by then deceased, northwest passage seeker Henry Hudson. Might that have influenced the spelling?


In any case, I found no evidence of an earlier "Hudson's choice." The otherwise earliest I could manage was 1808, but that was a ghost-OCR error for an actual printed Hobson's. An 1846 Newcastle-Upon-Tyne newspaper did include a pretended court document against a Hudson, quickly renamed Hobson, but that was surely a mere play on names (showing it could play either way) against crooked and eventually convicted railroad investor George Hudson (1800-1871).


Thomas Hobson was a famous man and honored benefactor to Cambridge. Poetic University witty (?) epitaphs were written about him; to paraphrase one: Hobson used to deliver several sheets of mail, but now he is under one sheet. This was before John Milton wrote and published two epitaphs on Hobson. An entire book was written about Hobson's horse business in 1617: Hobson's Horse Load of Letters, or, Precedents for Epistles of Business.


Though "Hobson's choice" was given, beyond "this or nothing," an explicit narrative contextual explanation in print, as far as we know, in the Spectator in 1712, [https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=ucm.5326518822;view=1up;seq=153], unless evidence turns up for a better-attested and better-explained Hudson's choice, Occam leads us to choose Hobson.


Stephen Goranson

http://people.duke.edu/~goranson/

[.....origin of kibosh]


[1] Conveniently reprinted here in a useful though incomplete collection, with a conclusion I question:

https://wordhistories.net/2016/07/01/hobsons-choice/


[2] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89097316194;view=1up;seq=302


[3] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c109524895;view=1up;seq=674


<https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c109524895;view=1up;seq=674>


<https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c109524895;view=1up;seq=674>



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