Mrs Grundy

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Mrs Grundy is the personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety (from Thomas Morton's play Speed the Plough, which appeared in 1798).

(By contemporary rules of punctuation of 1798, still prevailing in North America today, she is Mrs. Grundy.)

Peter Fryer's book Mrs. Grundy: Studies in English Prudery concerns prudish behaviour, such as the use of euphemisms for underwear.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Mrs. Grundy was so well established in the public imagination as a canonical character that Samuel Butler, in his popular novel Erewhon, could refer to her in anagram (as the goddess Ydgrun).

Robert A. Heinlein also mentions her, for example, in his novels The Number of the Beast and To Sail Beyond The Sunset.

Charles Dickens also mentions her in his novel "Hard Times".

Phillip Jose Farmer's characters in the "The Fabulous Riverworld Series" also refer to Mrs. Grundy as prudishness incarnate in a negative way.