guardian

   Legally a guardian has the responsibility of looking after a child, or an adult incapable of looking after himself, in place of the natural parent. The word is also more loosely used of one who protects another. Thus Diomedes, in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (5:ii), has been asked by Troilus to watch over Cressida and Diomedes greets her: ‘How now, my charge!’ ‘Now, my sweet guardian,’ she replies, flirtatiously. In Sheridan’s The School for Scandal Sir Peter Teazle remarks that ‘on their father’s death, you know, I acted as a kind of guardian to them both,’ i.e. Joseph and Charles Surface. Charles later says to Sir Peter: ‘What! my old guardian!’ In Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, Esther calls Mr Jarndyce ‘sir’. ‘I think you had better call me Guardian, my dear,’ he tells her. Mr Jarndyce has become Esther’s protector and guardian in an informal way some years previously, improving the quality of her life greatly. She uses ‘Guardian’ to him after this, almost as if the word were ‘Father’.