O God! that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!

These lines come from Thomas Hood’s social-protest poem “The Song of the Shirt,” written in the early Victorian period amid public anxiety over urban poverty and the exploitation of needlewomen in London. Hood, a journalist and poet often drawn to humanitarian themes, published the poem in 1843, when debates about wages, food prices, and the human cost of industrial capitalism were prominent in the press. The exclamation crystallizes the poem’s indictment of an economy in which basic necessities (bread) are unaffordable while human life and labor (“flesh and blood”) are treated as expendable and cheaply bought.

The speaker’s cry is a bitter paradox: the essentials required to live are “dear,” while the living body—its labor, suffering, and even life—is “cheap.” Hood uses religious address (“O God!”) to frame the complaint as a moral scandal, not merely an economic one. The contrast between bread and “flesh and blood” evokes both literal hunger and the reduction of workers to consumable resources. In the poem’s larger context, the line functions as a concise social critique of wage labor that cannot sustain life, turning market prices into an ethical accusation against society’s priorities.