Literary notes about rake (AI summary)
Writers have long exploited the term “rake” for its dual capacity to evoke both a tangible tool and a character type steeped in disrepute. In some passages, “rake” depicts an actual implement used for gathering, as when a character busily rakes cinders or clears the land [1][2][3]. Yet in many literary works the word takes on a decidedly figurative tone—a label for a man of loose morals or a dissolute libertine, one whose behavior is as untidy as his reputation [4][5][6][7]. This layered usage, ranging from the everyday act of clearing away debris to symbolizing moral decay, demonstrates the word’s remarkable adaptability in literature [8][9].
- So when Bobbie came back from her last thorny journey with the dead rose-bushes, he had got the rake and was using it busily.
— from The Railway Children by E. Nesbit - But first he pulleth out the fire and the Coals with a Coal-rake , 13.
— from The Orbis Pictus by Johann Amos Comenius - Hoe or rake handles make excellent staffs.
— from Boy Scouts Handbook by Boy Scouts of America - Why, dear father and mother, to be sure he grows quite a rake!
— from Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson - A sort of lewd rake-hells, that care neither for God nor the devil
— from Every Man in His Humor by Ben Jonson - This was a rake’s reasoning, but even rakes are mistaken sometimes.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova - Yes—yes—our young Rake has parted with his Ancestors like old Tapestry—sold Judges and Generals by the foot—and maiden Aunts as cheap as broken China.
— from The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan - The capitalists would rake in the shekels, and make fortunes by buying up wreckage.
— from The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan - This failing to keep their rendezvous seemed to her an insult, and she tried to rake up other reasons to separate herself from him.
— from Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
