In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of the phrase ‘dark horse’ in a forgotten nineteenth-century novel
The novel The Young Duke may have been forgotten, but its author hasn’t been – even if his reputation as an author is not now as high as it once was. To make sense of this – and to discover what it has to do with the origins of the new well-known phrase, ‘dark horse’ – we need to go back to 1831.