Ironmongress

The younger Lady Suffolk only spread a small quantity made into ointment on a bank bill of 70,000 pound, and it has made her first love Lord Falkland marry her: Sir Th. Robinson who intended to outlive his Barbadoes ironmongress,¹³ is dying for love of the same Countess.[…]13. Sarah Booth, m. (1) Samuel Salmon; m. (2) (between 1742–7, when he was Gov. of Barbadoes) Sir Thomas Robinson, Bt, of Rokeby. ‘An ironmonger’s widow, who gave him 10,000l. to be a lady, but would not follow him to England’ (HW’s notes to Maty’s Memoirs . . . of . . . Chesterfield, at end of Philobiblon Society, Miscellanies 1867–8, xi. 71; gec, Baronetage; Emily J. Climenson, Elizabeth Montagu, 1906, ii. 276).

Then the portrait of Francis’s mistress is called La belle Furoniere, instead of Ferronière (the beautiful Ironmongress).

Our home was over an ironmonger’s shop, the ironmongress condescending to let us three rooms. She was a very grand lady was this ironmongress, very grand indeed; her flounces and her furbelows were wonderful to behold!

I understand; ah, if it were only in pursuit of some little ironmongress in the Pont Neuf, or the pretty widow of the Rue Saint Augustine, it might be worth your while.

The English Ironmongress / The war has done more to push English women to the front in the world’s great activities, than Mrs. Pankhurst and her associates in the suffrage campaign of “frightfulness” were able to do in all their years of hair-pulling and arson.

I often have the same dream: you are an ironmonger, I am your wife, an ironmongress …

The narrator is sensitive to country smells as well as to scenery, and to drunkenness, batterings, and the domestic tensions of local peasant households – encountered through friendships with the local poacher, Batt Ryan, and with the [?] village ironmongress.