Lord Dundreary

Lord Dundreary is a character of the 1858 English play Our American Cousin by Tom Taylor.

[1] The most famous scene involved Dundreary reading a letter from his even sillier brother.

The former referred to a particular style of facial hair taking the form of exaggeratedly bushy sideburns, also called "dundreary whiskers" (or "Piccadilly weepers" in England) which were popular between 1840 and 1870.

[3] The latter eponym was used to refer to 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").

[citation needed] 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 human and ape anatomical features (and their implications for evolutionary theory) in the form of a nonsensical speech supposed to have been written by Dundreary.