Note 25 — VI. Umbrellas.
Reading edition
The first Englishman who carried an umbrella was Jonas Hanway, who died in 1786, but it was known in England earlier. Beaumont and Fletcher allude to it in “Rule a Wife and Have a Wife”:
“Now are you glad, now is your mind at ease; Now you have got a shadow, an umbrella, To keep the scorching world’s opinion From your fair credit.”
And Ben Jonson, in “The Devil is an Ass”:
“And there she lay, flat spread as an umbrella.”
Kersey in his Dictionary, 1708, describes an umbrella as a “screen commonly used by women to keep off rain.”