There is an interesting and common figurative phrase, the walls are closing in, indicating that someone is trapped, panicked, running out of time, or doomed.
There is a related question about the phrase here, but it doesn't deal with the history or origin of the phrase:
The phrase got a lot of attention recently when someone close to U.S. President Trump used it to describe the mood inside the White House. This appeared in The Washington Post shortly after the indictment of several former members of the Trump campaign.
“The walls are closing in,” said one senior Republican in close contact with top staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. “Everyone is freaking out.”
Google NGram suggests that the phrase appeared in the middle of the 20th century and grew gradually in frequency of use.
I've heard this phrase so frequently that I don't think twice hearing it, but on further thought, it seems like a unique idiom, as the notion of walls literally closing in on somebody is not something that anyone would experience in a literal sense.
Looking further, I found some early uses that suggest to me that the phrase was possibly adopted from references used in World War II, where "walls" refers to the walls of an army encircling the enemy.
This newspaper clipping appeared on January 1st, 1944, and quotes President Roosevelt saying "walls are closing in remorselessly on our enemies."
Questions:
- Did this figurative phrase indeed originate in a military context?
- Did Roosevelt's use of the phrase prompt the popularity of the metaphor?
- Are there earlier examples of the phrase used in a figurative context?
Best Answer
Here are some early instances of "walls closing in," from various Elephind searches of old newspapers. From Julia Pardoe, "The Headsman of Strasbourg," in the [Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania] Post (June 24, 1859), originally published in Episodes of French History During the Consulate and the First Empire (1859), by Miss Pardoe:
From "Watchman, What of the Night!" in the Richmond [Indiana] Palladium (February 2, 1860):
From "Our Trip," in the [Springfield] Illinois Farmer (July 1, 1860):
From "Down a Freiburg Silver Mine," from the St. James Magazine, reprinted in the Wellsboro [Pennsylvania] Agitator (March 29, 1865):
The prison or crypt motif seems to be a recurring on in most of these early instances. One classic story in which prison walls close in on a prisoner is Edgar Allen Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," 1842) in which a prisoner of the Inquisition was subjected first to a razor-edged pendulum gradually being lowered toward him as he lay bound in ropes, and then by a yawning pit in the middle of his chamber, and finally by the heated, moving walls of the chamber slowly coming together and forcing him toward the aforesaid pit. Poe never refers to the walls as "closing in," however, although he does end with this image:
But the Vivenzio story mentioned in the "Watchman, What of the Night" article from the 1860 Richmond Palladium is more than a decade older than Poe's story. From William Mudford, "The Iron Shroud," originally in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (1830):
Mudford's story was widely reprinted in other periodicals and story anthologies, and the Wikipedia article on "The Iron Shroud" says that "The story is considered to have provided Edgar Allan Poe with the idea of the shrinking cell in his short story 'The Pit and the Pendulum'." Still, even if these stories did spark the popular image of walls closing in on a captive victim, the actual phrase "the walls were closing in upon" may not have appeared in print until 1859.