Darby and Joan

Darby and Joan is a proverbial phrase for a married couple content to share a quiet life of mutual devotion.

The Nuttall Encyclopædia defined the phrase as "a married couple celebrated for their mutual attachment", the Random House Dictionary as "a happily married couple who lead a placid, uneventful life." The Reader's Encyclopedia mentions the "loving, old-fashioned and virtuous" qualities of Darby and Joan. In England, clubs for senior citizens are often called Darby and Joan Clubs, a usage thought to originate from a club in Streatham founded in 1942.

John Darby and his wife Joan were first mentioned in print in a poem published in The Gentleman's Magazine by Henry Woodfall in 1735, original title The Joys of Love never forgot. A Song. Woodfall had been apprentice to Darby, a printer in Bartholomew Close in the Little Britain area of London, who died in 1730. The poem was issued again as a broadsheet in 1748. One stanza of this poem reads:

The apparent popularity of this poem led to another titled "Darby and Joan" by St. John Honeywood (1763–1798). It reads, in part:

Lord Byron referred to the old couple in a letter addressed to Francis Hodgson on 8 December 1811:

Frederic Weatherly mentioned the couple in the Victorian era. His poem "Darby and Joan" concludes with the following:

They appear also in We Have Loved of Yore from Robert Louis Stevenson's Songs of Travel and Other Verses, published in 1896:

Woodfall's poem was set to music, as a ballad, by the time of the appearance in 1805 of James Plumptre's Collection of Songs, where it was #152 in the first volume.

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