The line is a piece of dialogue from Charles Reade’s novel A Simpleton: A Story of the Day, first published in three volumes by Chapman and Hall in 1873. It is spoken in Chapter XIII by Lieutenant Fitzroy, needling the invalid young Lord Tadcaster over who gets the safer bunk aboard ship — and it appears verbatim in the full text at Project Gutenberg ↗. Wikiquote files it under Charles Dickens’s Misattributed heading and credits Reade.
“Well, every one for himself, and Providence for us all — as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens” Charles Reade, A Simpleton: A Story of the Day (London: Chapman and Hall, 1873), chapter 13. Commonly misattributed to Charles Dickens. Verified at Quotle.info.
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Provenance
The source, located
Work
A Simpleton: A Story of the Day
First published
London: Chapman and Hall, 1873 (three volumes)
Location
Chapter XIII — spoken by Lieutenant Fitzroy to Lord Tadcaster
Popularly credited to
Charles Dickens — listed under “Misattributed” on Wikiquote
“He is not ill: I am. He is paid to take care of me: I am not paid to take care of him,” said the young lord sententiously.
“I understand,” replied Fitzroy, dryly. “Well, every one for himself, and Providence for us all—as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens.”
Chapter XIII
The two men are aboard ship, dividing up the sleeping berths: Fitzroy has offered the invalid Lord Tadcaster his choice, and the boy has just taken the safe standing bed and left the swinging cot to his doctor.
Wikiquote’s Charles Dickens page ↗ places the quotation under Misattributed and credits “Charles Reade, A Simpleton (1873)”; the Charles Reade page ↗ carries it with the same source.
The pull toward Dickens is easy to explain: this style of joke is a Wellerism ↗, named after Sam Weller in Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers. That is an association, not an attribution — a search of the full Gutenberg text of Pickwick finds no “chickens” and no “Providence for us all”.
✓Public domain
A Simpleton was first published in London by Chapman and Hall in 1873, long before the 1931 cut-off for US public domain, so both the novel and this sentence are free of copyright. The text is distributed openly by Project Gutenberg ↗; no translation is involved, as Reade wrote in English.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
How Dickens got the credit
This is one of the cleanest misattributions in the quote world: a real line, from a real Victorian novel, by the wrong Victorian novelist.
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AuthorCharles Dickens Misattributed
Wikiquote carries the quotation in the Misattributed section of its Charles Dickens page ↗ and credits Charles Reade, A Simpleton (1873). Quote aggregators still headline it as a Dickens line — one page ↗ prints “Charles Dickens” at the top and then flags it as misattributed to Reade directly underneath.
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Wording“Every man for himself, as the elephant said…” Reworded
The version that circulates usually drops Reade’s middle clause, “and Providence for us all”, which is the half the joke is actually deflating. Tommy Douglas’s much-quoted parliamentary version, sourced on Wikiquote ↗ to the Budget Debate in the House of Commons, Ottawa, 22 March 1943, runs “It is the law of every man for himself, as the elephant said when he was dancing among the chickens.”
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In the wildA Depression-era cartoon caption Second-hand
A HuffPost column ↗ recalls an old cartoon of an elephant cavorting in a chicken coop and describes its caption as a paraphrase of Dickens — a good illustration of how the credit travels without anyone checking a text.
✓The words are Charles Reade’s, given to Lieutenant Fitzroy in Chapter XIII of A Simpleton (1873) — readable in full at Project Gutenberg ↗.
Context
Why this line keeps getting borrowed
Reade’s joke is a Wellerism: a proverb hijacked by a literal-minded speaker who ruins it. The proverbial half — every one for himself, and Providence for us all — sounds like humble resignation until an elephant says it while trampling a coop. The form is named after Sam Weller in Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, serialised March 1836 to November 1837 and issued as a book in 1837, which is very likely why a Wellerism written by somebody else keeps drifting back onto Dickens’s shelf.
The gag also had a long political afterlife. In the Budget Debate in the House of Commons in Ottawa on 22 March 1943, Tommy Douglas turned it into an argument: free enterprise, he said, is the law of every man for himself, as the elephant said when he was dancing among the chickens — fine if you are in the elephant class, depressing if you are a farmer or a worker in the chicken group.
The proverb sounds pious. The elephant makes it a confession.
How we checked it
The wording was matched character-for-character against the Project Gutenberg text of A Simpleton, where it sits in Chapter XIII inside a two-line exchange between Lieutenant Fitzroy and Lord Tadcaster.
The Internet Archive holds a scan of the 1873 Chapman and Hall three-volume first edition, which fixes the publication year independently of the Gutenberg transcription.
We searched the full Gutenberg text of The Pickwick Papers for the phrase. “Chickens” does not occur in the book at all, and neither does “Providence for us all”; the four uses of “elephant” are unrelated.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Charles Reade (8 June 1814 – 11 April 1884) was a British novelist and dramatist, best remembered today for the historical romance The Cloister and the Hearth (1861). He built his reputation on campaigning fiction — It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856) attacked prison conditions and Hard Cash (1863) went after private lunatic asylums — though he rated Griffith Gaunt (1866) his own best book. A Simpleton (1873), the novel that carries this line, is one of his later society stories, and its dialogue has the brisk comic snap that keeps getting mistaken for his more famous contemporary.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Charles Reade, A Simpleton: A Story of the Day, 3 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1873), chap. 13. Text confirmed against Project Gutenberg ebook no. 2301.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Well, every one for himself, and Providence for us all — as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/well-every-one-for-himself-and-providence-for-us-all-as-the/