The Coventry cold shoulder

QUESTION

In Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, there is a reference to sending someone to Coventry. When did this idea originate? This phrase pre-dates Dickens to the English Civil War.

The story relates to st John the Baptist Church in Coventry’s Corporation street, where captured scottish Royalist soldiers were incarcerated after the Battle of Preston in 1648.

Coventry was a staunch Parliamentarian town and the inhabitants shunned the Royalist scots. This is the chief theory for the phrase ‘sent to Coventry’, as a synonym for being given the cold shoulder or ignored.

A description was given in Grose’s The Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue published in 1811, a year before Dickens’s birth: ‘The person sent to Coventry is considered as absent; no one must speak to or answer any question he asks...On a proper submission, the penitent is recalled and welcomed, as just returned from a journey to Coventry.’ Joseph Bowdler, Coventry.

QUESTION

In the 1800s, was it proposed to build a giant pyramid as the final resting place for five million Londoners? ARChiTECT Thomas Willson was proud of the 94-storey pyramid to the dead he designed, mentioned in a previous answer.

he described it as a ‘coup d’oeil of sepulchral magnificence unequalled in this world’.

Architectural historian N.B. Penny gave an alternative view, calling it a ‘nightmarish combination of megalomaniacal Neo-Classicism and dehumanised Utilitarian efficiency’.