Does your life so lack meaning - can you find no other way to spend your fortune but on impossible curiosities? I have heard of this before - this is as thing gentlemen do, collectors, who find satisfaction in making perfect wonders their own possessions, and hoarding them away in dusty cabinets.
-- Captain Tysoe Jones (Volume 2; Chapter 7 )

Importance: Captain Tysoe Jones, the man who brought Mr. Hancock the mermaid and who first saw its value, questions the logic of the wealthy curiosity collectors of England in this quote. Yet it was by realizing the dynamic he talks about here that he changed his fate, along with the fate of Mr. Hancock and everyone around him.

But amongst all this brave order there are those who have fallen loose from it, as screws from a fine machine. In this city of a thousand trades, there is only one that the women return to as if they were...
-- Mr. Hancock (Volume 1; Chapter 20)