winding-sheet

winding-sheet (plural winding-sheets)

1. Dated form of winding sheet.
   • 1846 October 1 – 1848 April 1, Charles Dickens, “In which Mr. Dombey, as a Man and a Father, is seen at the head of the Home-Department”, in Dombey and Son, London: Bradbury and Evans, , published 1848, →OCLC, page 16:

     Accordingly, mysterious shapes were made of tables and chairs, heaped together in the middle of rooms, and covered over with great winding-sheets.

   • 1857, C H Spurgeon, Sermons of the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, of London, New York, N.Y.: Robert Carter & Brothers, page 356:

     It is so woven into the very warp and woof of our nature, that till we are wrapped in our winding-sheets we shall never hear the last of it.

   • 1858, Hugh Miller, “Rambles of a Geologist; or Ten Thousand Miles over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland”, in The Cruise of the Betsey; . With Rambles of a Geologist; ., Edinburgh: Thomas Constable and Co.; London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., chapter X, page 399:

     The painter had set himself, with, I doubt not, fair moral intent, to exhibit a skeleton wrapped up in a winding-sheet; […]

   • 1859, Charles Dickens, “Congratulatory”, in A Tale of Two Cities, London: Chapman and Hall, , →OCLC, book II (The Golden Thread), page 55:

     He resorted to his pint of wine for consolation, drank it all in a few minutes, and fell asleep on his arms, with his hair straggling over the table, and a long winding-sheet in the candle dripping down upon him.

   • 1890, Catherine [Edith Macauley] Martin, edited by Rosemary Campbell, An Australian Girl, University of Queensland Press, published 2002, →ISBN, volume I, chapter IV, page 52:

     Thinglets fit only to wrap candles in, or make winding-sheets in Lent for pilchards, or keep butter in the market-place from melting.

   • 1992 October, Don DeLillo, “Pafko at the Wall”, in Harper’s Magazine, volume 285, number 1709, pages 35–67:

     The dead have come to take the living. The dead in winding-sheets, the regimented dead on horseback, the skeleton that plays a hurdy-gurdy.

   • 1993, Lisa Goldstein, Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon, New York, N.Y.: Tom Doherty Associates, page 222:

     The driver swore and he hurried out of the way, but he was not quick enough to escape the foul odor of death that trailed behind the cart. As it passed he saw the five or six bodies in winding-sheets piled on top of each other.

   • 1994, Audrey Borenstein, “Evanescence”, in Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies, volume 26, numbers 1–4, page 384:

     Morrison, the leader of their inner circle of campus radicals, in the yellow winding-sheet, his freckled face covered with pancake make-up, his red hair stuffed into a yellow bathing-cap, announcing he would immolate himself at dawn.