{"id":82319,"date":"2015-02-03T16:01:25","date_gmt":"2015-02-03T21:01:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=82319"},"modified":"2015-02-03T16:01:25","modified_gmt":"2015-02-03T21:01:25","slug":"golden-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/03\/golden-brown\/","title":{"rendered":"Golden Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"An_alchemist._Oil_painting_by_E._Lomont,_1890_Wellcome_L0075259\"<\/a>

E. Lomont, An Alchemist<\/i>, 1890.<\/p><\/div>\n

Here\u2019s a phrase you don\u2019t read much nowadays: brown study<\/em>. First cited in the sixteenth century (specifically in a book called Dice-Play<\/em>), the expression\u2014which describes a state of intense, sometimes melancholy reverie\u2014really seems to have hit its stride in the nineteenth. Dr. Watson describes \u201cfalling into a brown study\u201d in the course of\u00a0\u201cThe\u00a0Adventure of the Cardboard Box.\u201d In Louisa May Alcott\u2019s Eight Cousins<\/em>, Uncle\u00a0Alec \u201cpaced up and down the lower hall in the twilight for an hour, thinking so intently that sometimes he frowned, sometimes he smiled, and more than once he stood still in a\u00a0brown study.\u201d In David Copperfield<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>Dickens uses it like this: \u201cI fell into a brown study as I walked on, and a voice at my side made me start.\u201d \u00a0Meanwhile, here\u2019s Conrad, in \u201cThrift and the Child\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

He ceased and sat solemnly dejected, in a brown study. What day? I asked at last; but he did not hear me apparently. He suffused such portentous gloom into the atmosphere that I lost patience with him.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These were all books written for a popular audience; presumably the phrase was in regular use in both the English and American vernacular.\u00a0What seems puzzling now would not have to a population who knew brown as a color associated with sadness. Indeed, brown<\/em>\u00a0was once used the way we do blue<\/em>\u00a0today\u2014to connote melancholy. And it\u2019s a good phrase, well suited to stories sustained by brisk narrative pace; in such cases as these, it was doubtless useful to be able to sketch interiority in a couple of words. <\/p>\n

However, there are brown studies and brown studies. In an 1867 volume of\u00a0The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art<\/em>, a critic took George Sand to task thus: \u201cWhether it be that the veteran novelist has for once overstrained her powers by a forced and unnatural effort, or that a brown study is a mental attitude wholly foreign to the temperament of Madame Sand, La Reverie a Paris<\/em> strikes us as about the dullest and most vapid piece of writing in the book.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

After that, I had to read this abomination\u2014and while it didn\u2019t set the world on fire, I thought the reviewer was a bit harsh. In any event, if this is how private musings were greeted, you can see why a writer of the period might have felt more comfortable sticking to a two-word abstraction\u2014however vague.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a phrase you don\u2019t read much nowadays: brown study. First cited in the sixteenth century (specifically in a book called Dice-Play), the expression\u2014which describes a state of intense, sometimes melancholy reverie\u2014really seems to have hit its stride in the nineteenth. Dr. Watson describes \u201cfalling into a brown study\u201d in the course of\u00a0\u201cThe\u00a0Adventure of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[16876,1203,15630,16360,687,6028,16877,16874,16875,2393],"class_list":["post-82319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-brown-study","tag-charles-dickens","tag-contemplation","tag-george-sand","tag-language","tag-louisa-may-alcott","tag-melancholy","tag-phrases","tag-terms","tag-words"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhy Did the Phrase \u201cBrown Study\u201d Fall Out of Fashion?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Our ancestors used it all the time. 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