“Onward and upward” is what people say when the only useful direction left is forward. It works two ways: as a genuine exhortation to press on towards better things, and as a wry shrug after a setback, the verbal equivalent of dusting yourself off (“well, that interview was a disaster - onward and upward”). British speakers often make it “onwards and upwards”. Either way it signals that the speaker has decided not to dwell. The tone today is usually light, but the phrase began life in deadly earnest, as a piece of Victorian moral uplift.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘onward and upward’?
Both words are ancient, but the pairing is a nineteenth-century creation. Google’s digitised-books corpus shows only scattered appearances before the 1830s, then a steady climb through the Victorian decades to a nineteenth-century high in the 1890s. The combination suited the age perfectly: progress (“onward”) joined to moral and spiritual improvement (“upward”), compressed into a two-word sermon.
The early appearances are exactly where you would expect, in improving verse and pulpit prose. The actress and writer Fanny Kemble used the pairing in a valedictory poem addressed to boys leaving the academy at Lenox, Massachusetts, published in her Poems of 1844:
Fail not for sorrow, falter not for sin,
But onward, upward, till the goal ye win;
God guard ye, and God guide ye on your way,
Young pilgrim warriors who set forth to-day.
A year later the American poet James Russell Lowell put the two words to work in “The Present Crisis”, written in December 1845, in lines that were quoted for generations afterwards:
New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth.
Neither writer coined the phrase so much as caught it on its way up. By the second half of the century “onward and upward” (with “upward and onward” running alongside as a common variant) had become a stock motto for the self-improvement movement, adopted by schools, societies and religious tracts. The most literal example is Scottish: in the 1880s and 90s Ishbel, Lady Aberdeen expanded her scheme for educating the servant girls around Haddo House in Aberdeenshire into the Onward and Upward Association, complete with a monthly magazine, Onward and Upward, which ran from 1890 to 1920.
That earnestness is precisely what the twentieth century found funny. The New Yorker adopted “Onward and Upward” for its long-running department headings, most famously “Onward and Upward with the Arts”, using the old motto with a raised eyebrow. Under the sister heading “Onward and Upward in the Garden”, the magazine’s fiction editor Katharine S. White published fourteen essays between 1958 and 1970, collected in 1979 as a book of the same name, edited by her husband E. B. White.
Modern usage sits somewhere between the Victorians and The New Yorker: a phrase people mean sincerely, but deliver with a smile, when there is nothing to be done about a disappointment except get on with the next thing. It keeps close company with ‘every cloud has a silver lining’, the other stock consolation for a setback.