Posted by Mike Field on August 28, 2008 at 03:23:09 user mikefield.
Nancy uses quite a few colourful, non-profane expletives throughout the books -- jib-booms and bobstays, barbecued billygoats, and so on. I've always assumed them all to have been AR's inventions. But I've just found out that one of them at least was in use two decades or more earlier.
On rediscovering, after about fifty years, Mary Grant Bruce's "Billabong" series of books, I was surprised to find on the very last page of the first book ("A Little Bush Maid,") the expression "prunes and prisms" -- used, what's more, in much the same way as Nancy's use of it to describe the "lady-like" behaviour required by the GA.
The heroine in this case is twelve-year-old Norah Linton, not a tom-boy quite as Nancy is, but nevertheless having been brought up on an Australian cattle station, and far more comfortable on a horse than in a school-room (cf Nancy's living next to the Lake and being far more comfortable in a boat.) Indeed, Norah's only education so far has been at home, in station matters.
The context is that a newly-engaged home tutor for Norah jokingly says to her father, "When next Monday comes, Mr Linton... you can say good-bye to your pickle of a daughter. She will come out from my mill ground into the most approved type of young lady -- accomplishments, prunes and prisms personified!"
"A Little Bush Maid" was published in 1911, the first of AR's books not until 1930. I wonder whether "prunes and prisms" was a common-enough expression in those days, or whether AR found it just where I did and thought it altogether too good to pass up.