Word: 1880s
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...undergraduate at Oxford's Corpus Christi College in the 1880s, Massachusetts-born Edward Perry Warren was bitterly annoyed by the 9 p.m. curfew. He was also annoyed by the fines for curfew stragglers, which sometimes ran as high as ?5 after midnight. Before he died in 1928, wealthy (from paper mills), eccentric Edward Warren sat down and wrote a 59-page will. One among many bequests: a straightfaced offer of ?3,000 to Corpus Christi, provided college authorities would use the money to build a tunnel under the walls so that stragglers could get to bed without 1) paying...
...Ideal Pattern. When Australian-born Gilbert Murray entered St. John's College, Oxford, in the 1880s, the great Greek Scholar Benjamin Jowett, translator of Plato and Master of Balliol College, was one of the most venerated and influential men in England; Gladstone and his Liberals seemed to be among the eternal forces in English politics, and the poetry of Tennyson and Swinburne was much admired. In years to follow, if fewer & fewer men bore the hallmark of the Greek scholar and the classicist, it was not Gilbert Murray's fault...
...scene of The Innocents is a great rambling English country house in the 1880s. There, alone with the housekeeper and two children, is a sensitive young governess. But she finds that she is not alone with them. Hovering malignly about are the ghosts of a sinister valet and the governess he had driven to suicide. While these two lived, she learns from the housekeeper, they had some kind of hold over the seemingly innocent but strangely knowing children; and now, she feels, they have it again as ghosts. She sends the eight-year-old girl away with the housekeeper...
Other words spring from men and events. In the 1880s members of the Irish Land League gave the silent treatment to a hated estate agent named Captain Charles Boycott. The method they used stuck, and so did boycott. A century before, France's finance minister, Etienne de Silhouette, introduced a series of such niggardly reforms that his name became a synonym for anything meager and finally for a portrait in barest outline...
...scene is the 1880s, when France had just shipped the Statue of Liberty (in 200-odd cases) to the U.S. The plot concerns a circulation war over the statue between Joseph Pulitzer's N.Y. World and James Gordon Bennett's N.Y. Herald. A Herald photographer brings over from Paris the girl who was Sculptor Bartholdi's model for the statue-only it turns out that she wasn't. The customary hocus-pocus leads to the customary happy ending...