Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 252, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 October 1911 — Mrs. Grundy. [ARTICLE]

Mrs. Grundy.

“What will Mrs. Grundy say?” This query occurs in an old play called “Speed the Plough.” The author of it was one Thomas Morton, a forgotten playwright. First acted in 1798—the year of the Battle of the Nile, and the Irish Rebellion—this play had then a “run” of, forty-one nights and subsequently it was much revived. A farmer’s wife in the play, Mrs. Ashfield by name, Insistently refers to her rival, the wife of a neighboring farmer, whom she calls Mrs. Grundy. This second woman does not appear on the stage. It is the ruling passion with Mrs. Ashfield to have everything superior to what Mrs. Grundy may possess. In the keenness of feminine rivalry Mrs. Ashfleld is controlled in all her investments in personal apparel, when selecting her new gown, her bonnet, her jewelry, in all she does, Indeed, by the determination to “spite” her rival as expressed in the exclamation, “What will Mrs. Grundy say?” From Morton’s “Speed the Plough” came to us the invisible yet übiquitous Mrs. Grundy. By a curious transfer of symbolism, however, Mrs. Grundy passed with time inte a concrete and personal equivalent for the public opinion which supports the proprieties, the respectabilities.