Gamp (Mrs.)

or Sarah Gamp (g hard). A monthly nurse, famous for her bulky umbrella and perpetual reference to Mrs. Harris, a purely imaginary person, whose opinions always confirmed her own. (Dickens: Martin Chuzzlewit.)

“Mrs. Harris, I says to her, if I could afford to lay out all my fellow creeturs for nothink, I would gladly do it. Such is the love I bear ʹem.”

Punch caricatures the Standard as “Mrs. Sarah Gamp,” a little woman with an enormous bonnet and her characteristic umbrella.

A Sarah Gamp, or Mrs. Gamp. A big, pawky umbrella, so called from Sarah Gamp. (See above.)

In France it is called un Robinson, from Robinson Crusoe’s umbrella. (Defoe.)

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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.

Gamp (Mrs.)

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