What is "backcloths"

Usage examples of "backcloths".

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.