Lord Dundreary

Edward Sothern as Lord Dundreary, sporting "Dundrearies"

Lord Dundreary is a character of the 1858 British play Our American Cousin by Tom Taylor. He is the personification of a good-natured, brainless aristocrat. The role was created on stage by Edward Askew Sothern.^[1] The most famous scene involved Dundreary reading a letter from his even sillier brother. Sothern expanded the scene considerably in performance. A number of spin-off works were also created, including a play about the brother.

His name gave rise to two eponyms rarely heard today: Dundrearies were a particular style of facial hair taking the form of exaggeratedly bushy sideburns, also called dundreary whiskers. They were popular between 1840 and 1870 and in England were called Piccadilly weepers.^[2]

"Dundrearyisms" were expanded malapropisms in the form of twisted and nonsensical aphorisms in the style of Lord Dundreary (e.g. "birds of a feather gather no moss"). These enjoyed a brief vogue.

Charles Kingsley wrote an essay entitled, "Speech of Lord Dundreary in Section D, on Friday Last, On the Great Hippocampus Question", a parody of debates about evolutionary theory in the form of a nonsensical speech supposed to have been written by Dundreary.^[3]

References

1.  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Wood, James, ed. (1907). "Dundreary, Lord". The Nuttall Encyclopædia. London and New York: Frederick Warne.
2. dundrearies, Merriam-Webster Word of the Day, August 23, 2012
3. Charles Kingsley (1861) "Speech of Lord Dundreary in Section D, on Friday Last, On the Great Hippocampus Question"

• Michael Diamond, Victorian Sensation, London: Anthem, 2003, ISBN 1-84331-150-X, pp. 266–268