Darby and Joan

A devoted elderly couple leading an uneventful life. These paradigms of lengthy connubial bliss first appeared in an 1735 poem by the otherwise-forgotten Henry Woodfall; the Darby in question was the master to whom Woodfall had been a printer's apprentice. More distinguished authors who referred to the couple included Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry James. And they also appear in Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's wistful ballad, The Folks Who Live on the Hill ballad: “We'll sit and look at the same old view / Just we two / Darby and Joan who used to be Jack and Jill . . .”