Darby and Joan

John Darby and his wife Joan were first mentioned in print in a poem published in The Gentleman's Magazine by Henry Woodfall (c. 1686–1747) in 1735, original title The Joys of Love never forgot.

They appear also in We Have Loved of Yore from Robert Louis Stevenson's Songs of Travel and Other Verses, published in 1896:[5] Frost has bound our flowing river, Snow has whitened all our island brake, And beside the winter fagot Joan and Darby doze and dream and wake.

[6] Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern's 1937 ballad "The Folks Who Live On the Hill" mentions Darby and Joan: We'll sit and look at the same old view, Just we two.

A relatively modern music reference to "Darby and Joan" is found in the 1969 pop release of the same name, written and performed by Lyn "Twinkle" Ripley, an English singer-songwriter.

"[7] A reference to Darby and Joan appears in The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson (1825), the well-known courtesan whom the Duke of Wellington famously told to "publish and be damned!"

You might be Darby and Joan, and play cribbage to the end of your lives.They appear in Anthony Trollope's novel Phineas Finn (Chapter 51, "Troubles at Loughlinter"), published in 1869: He was disposed to think that the whirlwind had hitherto been too predominant, and had said so very plainly with a good deal of marital authority.

his wife had asked him, when the proposition was made to her.and there are also several references in Trollope's subsequent The Prime Minister (1876), when Lady Glencora, Duchess of Omnium, bridles at her husband's requests that she put an end to the string of lavish parties she has been throwing to celebrate his selection as the country's leader.

'and 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.Jerome K. Jerome, in his play The Passing of the Third Floor Back: An Idle Fancy In a Prologue, A Play, and An Epilogue (1908) has a character (Mrs. de Hooley) refer ironically to an argumentative couple (Major and Mrs. Tomkins) as "Darby and Joan."

Albert Camus' translator Stuart Gilbert said "they weren't one of those exemplary married couples of the Darby-and-Joan pattern" on page 70 of The Plague (Vintage 1991 edition).

Camus did not use the phrase himself in 'La Peste' (1947: 57): "Ce n'etait même pas un de ces ménages qui offrent au monde l'exemple d'un bonheur exemplaire..." Louisa May Alcott's "Moods" Chapter 14:Why not, if you can bear our quiet life, for we are a Darby and Joan already, though we do not look so to-night, I acknowledge.These were set up by the Women's Voluntary Service (WVS) after World War II.