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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
backcloth
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Given a positive backcloth, constructive and honest appraisal is a challenging process, not something to be feared.
▪ So design one on the same scale as the backcloth.
▪ The distant mountains form the backcloth of an opera set.
▪ The objective, in turn, provides a backcloth against which to make choices about how best to behave.
▪ This is the backcloth to the dramatic events that were soon to follow.
▪ This novel and distinctive economic backcloth to the inter-war years had a number of important consequences for town planning.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
backcloth

backdrop \back"drop\ n.

  1. the scenery hung at back of stage. Also called in Britain backcloth.

    Syn: background, backcloth

  2. the background, setting, or circumstances of an event; as, the backdrop for the summit meeting.

Wiktionary
backcloth

n. the painted scenery at the back of a stage; the backdrop

WordNet
backcloth

n. scenery hung at back of stage [syn: backdrop, background]

Usage examples of "backcloth".

Are we but mocking at Utopias, you demand, using all these noble and generalised hopes as the backcloth against which two bickering personalities jar and squabble?

Wyckoff Street over this seething backcloth, the grays and sepias of brick and iron and asphalt never completely concealing the rotted hues beneath, so that for all the carefully rendered detail, Wyckoff Street looked like a veil drawn over a more insistent and powerful reality.

As she swam further out to sea and then turned back and looked along the snarling milk-white teeth of England to the distant arm of Dover and at the black and white confetti of the ravens and gulls tossed against the vivid backcloth of green fields, she decided that anything was permissible on such a day and that, just this once, she would forgive him.

Sometimes he was foot-loose for a while, for the sake of conviction, far up the steep cobbled street taking pictures of the sunlit pattern of the village, green corrugations of shutters, white backward-leaning walls, shallow beautiful roofs with the perpendicular slopes of trees hung like improbable backcloths behind them.

But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England.

The house was at his back like a last line of defence, but indeed he had been driven out of its empty rooms by their heaviness of association, by the manner in which they were now only stage backcloths for the events of November forty years before.

He’d laid down a field of mushy scarlets and ochers, like the guts of an over-ripe pomegranate, and then stroked the details of Wyckoff Street over this seething backcloth, the grays and sepias of brick and iron and asphalt never completely concealing the rotted hues beneath, so that for all the carefully rendered detail, Wyckoff Street looked like a veil drawn over a more insistent and powerful reality.