Darby and Joan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The term 'Darby and Joan' is defined by the Random House Dictionary as "a happily married couple who lead a placid, uneventful life." The Reader's Encyclopedia mentions the "loving, old-fashioned and virtuous" qualities of Darby and Joan. The term is also used disparagingly to describe younger people who are perceived to favour spending their evenings in, or following pursuits seen as "middle-aged". In England, clubs for senior citizens are appropriately called Darby and Joan Clubs.

It seems most likely that John Darby and his wife Joan were first mentioned in a poem published in The Gentleman's Magazine by Henry Woodfall in 1735. At that time Woodfall was apprentice to Darby, a printer from the town of Bartholemew Close. The poem was issued again as a broadside in 1748. One stanza of this poem reads:

Old Darby, with Joan by his side

You've often regarded with wonder.

He's dropsical, she is sore-eyed

Yet they're ever uneasy asunder.

The apparent popularity of this poem led to another titled "Darby and Joan" by St. John Honeywood (1763-98). It reads, in part:

When Darby saw the setting sun,

He swung his scythe and home he run,

Sat down, drank off his quart and said,

"My work is done, I'll go to bed."

Lord Byron refers to the old couple in a letter addressed to Francis Hodgson on 8 December 1811 (Leslie A. Marchand, ed. 'Famous in my time': Byron's letters and Journals, Vol. 2, 1810-1812),(1973):

"Master William Harness and I have recommenced a most fiery correspondence; I like him as Euripdes liked Agatho, or Darby admired Joan, as much for the past as the present."

It was Frederic Edward Weatherby who kept the torch burning for this rustic couple in the Victorian era. His poem "Darby and Joan" concludes with the following:

Hand in hand when our life was May

Hand in hand when our hair is grey

Shadow and sun for every one,

As the years roll on;

Hand in hand when the long night tide

Gently covers us side by side–

Ah! lad, though we know not when,

Love will be with us forever then:

Always the same, Darby my own,

Always the same to your old wife Joan.

Darby and Joan reappear in William Makepeace Thackeray's The History of Henry Esmond (1852), when the beautiful, spoiled Beatrix taunts Esmond for his seemingly hopeless infatuation with her:

"You have not enough money to keep a cat decently after you have your man his wages, and your landlady her bill. Do you think I'm going to live in a lodging, and turn the mutton at a string whilst your honour nurses the baby? Fiddlestick, and why did you not get this nonsense knocked out of your head when you were in the wars? You are come back more dismal and dreary than ever. You and mamma are fit for each other. You might be Darby and Joan, and play cribbage to the end of your lives."

Other references include this one from Ruth Rendell's The Best Man to Die (1981):

"My father called my mother darling once or twice and there was a kind of Darby and Joan air about them."

as well as this one from Henry James' The Golden Bowl (1904):

"Their very silence might have been the mark of something grave - their silence eked out for her by his giving her his arm and their then crawling up their steps quite mildly and unitedly together, like some old Darby and Joan who have had a disappointment."

And, of course, there's the reference to Darby and Joan near the end of Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern's 1937 ballad "The Folks Who Live on the Hill":

We'll sit and look at the same old view,

Just we two.

Darby and Joan who used to be Jack and Jill,

The folks who like to be called,

What they have always been called,

"The folks who live on the hill".

This, then, is the literary history of a term which has been generally understood to stand for a "happy old couple" for more than two hundred years.