I actually physically shake my head at them like Mrs. Grundy.
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232 With the fin de siècle erosion of the Victorian moral consensus,C H Sisson, English Poetry 1900-1950 (Manchester 1981) p. 17 Mrs Grundy began to lose her power, and by the 1920s she was already little more than a faded laughing-stock,Mrs Grundy Origin being mocked for example in the advice book for teens, Mrs Grundy is Dead (New York: Century, 1930).
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As a figure of speech, "Mrs Grundy" can be found throughout the English-speaking world.
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Mrs Grundy is a figurative name for an extremely conventional or priggish person, a personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety. A tendency to be overly fearful of what others might think is sometimes referred to as grundyism. Mrs Grundy originated as an unseen character in Thomas Morton's 1798 play Speed the Plough. References to Mrs Grundy were eventually so well established in the public imagination that in Samuel Butler's 1872 novel Erewhon, the goddess Ydgrun, an anagram for Grundy, dictates social norms.
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Peter Fryer (1965) Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery: 146. Corgi The British Association for the Promotion of Temperance was established by 1835.
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As of 2013, he continued to publish books in the series. Since 1999, Clive Murphy has published ten books of gay, often comic, ribaldry. The tenth, To Hell with Thomas Bowdler, Mrs Grundy and Mary Whitehouse!, was published in 2015.
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In 1829, the Presbyterian minister Rev. John Edgar initiated a temperance movement, by pouring his stock of whiskey out his window.Peter Fryer (1965) Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery: 141-44. Corgi Also, many Orange lodges are "temperance lodges" and abstain from drinking.
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Edgar is known as the origin of the Temperance Movement because he poured alcohol out his window in 1829.Peter Fryer (1965) Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery: 141-44. Corgi On 14 August 1829 he wrote a letter in the Belfast Telegraph advocating temperance. He formed the Ulster Temperance Movement.
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S Butler, Erewhon (London 1933) p. 144 His own preference was for the small group he called High Ydgrunites, who broadly accepted the low-norm conventions of the goddess, but were capable of rising above Mrs Grundy and her claims, if need be.Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism' (Princeton 1972) p.
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Her name is derived from Mrs Grundy, a name that has been used to refer to a prudish woman since the early nineteenth century. Before she became a teacher, she worked at a pickle-packing plant. During World War II, she served with the WACs, outranking Mr. Weatherbee. Despite occasional grumblings from her students, they seem to genuinely like and admire her.
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Although later usage positions her chiefly as a feared dispenser of disapproval, the Mrs Grundy of the play is, in Dame Ashfield's daydreams, not so much a figure of dread as a cowed audience to the accomplishments of the Ashfield family. As the play progresses, Dame Ashfield and her comical musings soon drop from sight to make way for melodrama.
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Burton had long had an interest in sexuality and some erotic literature. However, the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 had resulted in many jail sentences for publishers, with prosecutions being brought by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Burton referred to the society and those who shared its views as Mrs Grundy. A way around this was the private circulation of books amongst the members of a society.
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Henry Louis Stephens, untitled watercolor of a black man reading a newspaper by candlelight, . The paper's headline reports the Emancipation Proclamation. Stephens was well known as a caricaturist, excelling especially in the humorous delineation of animals, and drew cartoons and sketches for The Cyclopedia of Wit and Humor (1858), a book edited by William Evans Burton, Vanity Fair (1859–63), Mrs. Grundy (1869), Punchline (1870), and other periodicals.
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In 1876 the British Women's Temperance Association was formed to persuade men to stop drinking, rebranded in 2006 as the White Ribbon Association. From 1880 to 1882 the cause of abstinence was revived by the Gospel Temperance or Blue Ribbon movement, based in America. They sent a member named Richard Booth to promote their cause in England through mass meetings held up and down the country.Peter Fryer (1965) Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery: 153-4.
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Her 1936 book Mrs Grundy in Scotland is an investigation of the anxieties and pressure to conform to respectability norms in Scottish life. In 1949 she was painted by Nigel McIsaac, and the painting is in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. In 1958, Willa and Edwin Muir were granted the first Johann-Heinrich-Voss Translation Award.Homepage of the Johann Heinrich Voss Prize with List of Award-Winners Her husband died in 1959 and she wrote a memoir Belonging (1968) about their life together.
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Among his London roles were Kit Barniger in Mice and Men (1902 at the Lyric Theatre, leased by William Greet)Mice and Men was written by his wife, Madeleine Lucette Ryley and Josh Harmony in Mrs. Grundy (Scala Theatre, 1905), both plays by his wife who had become a successful playwright by the mid-1890s in both New York and London. Ryley was involved in the production of many of his wife's plays and often directed them. The couple also travelled extensively.
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Peter Fryer (1965) Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery: 141-44. Corgi Joseph Livesey was another British temperance advocate who financed his philanthropic work with the profits attained from cheese production, following an introduction to the food product by a doctor he had consulted with regards to a serious ailment in 1816. The term teetotal is derived from a speech by Richard (Dickie) Turner, a follower of Livesey, in Preston in 1833. Livesey opened the first temperance hotel in 1833 and the next year founded the first temperance magazine, The Preston Temperance Advocate (1834–37).
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An example would be the Scottish Prohibition Party, founded by a communist temperance activist called Bob Stewart, who followed the British Labour Party on all other issues. There was a Marxist offshoot called the Prohibition and Reform Party, which later became part of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920. Between the wars, American exponents of the sterling example set to Britain by National Prohibition, such as William "Pussyfoot" Johnson and Dr Armor, toured the country, to be met with derision, and in Johnson's case, violence.Peter Fryer (1965) Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery: 171-3.
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He wrote about 25 plays, several of which had great popularity, among them Columbus, or a World Discovered (1792); Children in the Wood (1793); Zorinski (1795); The Way to Get Married (1796); A Cure for the Heart Ache (1797); Speed the Plough (1798); Secrets Worth Knowing (1798); The Blind Girl, or A Receipt for Beauty (1801); The School of Reform, or How to Rule a Husband (1805); Town and Country, or Which Is Best? (1807); The Knight of Snowdown (1811); Education (1813); The Slave (1816); Methinks I See My Father (1818); A Roland for an Oliver (1819); Henri Quatre (1820); School for Grown Children (1826); and The Invincibles (1828). The name of one of the characters in Speed the Plough, Mrs Grundy, has entered the English language as a synonym for "prude".
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