On returning home from his first "half" at boarding school for one month, Charles Dickens's David Copperfield describes the "monstrous load" on his mind of his stepfather and step-aunt Mr. and Miss Murdstone as a "daymare that there was no possibility of breaking in." While Wiktionary includes this quotation in its definition of "daymare", the Oxford English Dictionary does not; its earliest reference is over a century earlier than Dickens's 1850 novel, in lines from Matthew Green's 1737 poem "The Spleen": "If I am right, your question lay, / What course I take to drive away / The day-mare Spleen, by whose false pleas / Men prove mere suicides in ease." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 9 November 2021)

From the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive.

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The "daymare" in Charles Dickens's "David Copperfield" and Matthew Green's "The Spleen"