Daylight robbery!

The saying “daylight robbery” is popularly believed to originate with the much-despised Window Tax introduced in England in 1696. Taxes are rarely popular, but the Window Tax, which was considered to tax the very stuff of life, that is, light and air, was singled out for particular loathing. People went to great pains to avoid paying it and many windows were bricked up for that reason.

That’s daylight robbery in anyone’s book, so do we need to look any further for the origin of the phrase? Well, yes we do. The phrase isn’t known in print until 1804, when it was used in its literal sense, that is, to describe an actual robbery which took place in daylight hours. That citation is in the English literary journal The Monthly Review September 1804. The first example that relates to our current colloquial meaning of unfair overcharging comes a little later, in the London magazine The Temple Bar in September, 1863: “It would be a bull worthy of an Irishman to call 1s. 6d. for ‘bougies’ a ‘daylight robbery’ “.

So, if the phrase came from the Window Tax, why no mention of it in print for over a hundred years after the tax was introduced? If we are looking for evidence that is beyond reasonable doubt, the Window Tax story doesn’t provide it. Unless and until evidence that relates the phrase to the tax is found we have to say that the origin is unknown.