I’m rereading Bleak House for probably the 6th time in my life, and came across this sentence:
“[Sir Leicester] conceives it utterly impossible that anything can be wanting, in any direction, by any one who has the good fortune to be received under that roof; and in a state of sublime satisfaction, he moves among the company, a magnificent refrigerator.”
The invention of the appliance we call refrigerator was of course well into the future, and I would have assumed the word came into existence with the machine. What do you suppose Dickens meant by the word?
by HudsonBunny
5 Comments
I’m thinking the word may have meant an icebox, or like, an unpowered refrigerator? I think in this context, it means to keep cool, keep the peace, keep tempers down?
Did you consult the OED?
My mother climbed into a dumpster outside a library back when I was a small child to pull out a
foot-thick Webster’s Second Unabridged, and I still have it. For what it’s worth, it says: “a refrigerator is that which refrigerates or makes cold; that which keeps cool. Specifically a box or room for keeping food or other articles cool.”
AND before it was the machine we know, it was apparently “any apparatus for rapidly cooling a heated liquid or vapor, connected to a still”— refrigerating was “to make or keep cold or cool, or to extract heat by lowering the temperature of the body and keeping its temperature below that of its surroundings.”
So I’m thinking maybe in the context Sir Leicester is sailing among his guests with a calming effect, reducing the temperature and causing a sense of stability— or that he himself stays cool and unbothered even when others or the atmosphere is heated. Does that make sense? 🤷🏻♀️
It seems the word was first used around the year 1600. A little research shows it refers to a man who is stress free, comfortable in his surroundings and its usage in the time of Dickens would simply refer to someone who is “cool” as opposed to hot headed when dealing with a situation. So it appears the term refrigerator as a mechanical device for storing food in a cool place actually comes from the earlier usage to refer to a cool and level headed person.
Wiktionary cites (with reference to the quote from BLEAK HOUSE) the meaning of “refrigerator” as “One who has a chilling influence”. Also, according to these [two](http://www.thisvictorianlife.com/kitchen-and-dining-room.html) [blogs](https://histsociety.blogspot.com/2013/12/iceboxes-vs-refrigerators.html), in the Victorian era the term “refrigerator” was more commonly used than “ice box” (with the term shifting once electric refrigerators became popular).
But obviously the real explanation is that Dickens was a time traveller.