Word of the day: pothook

It appears in a metaphor atop a metaphor, in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield . The narrator describes the houses on Tommy Traddles’s street:

They were all built on one monotonous pattern, and looked like the early copies of a blundering boy who was learning to make houses, and had not yet got out of his cramped brick and mortar pothooks.

The Oxford English Dictionary to the rescue. A pothook is

a hook suspended over a fireplace on which a pot or kettle may be hung.

But also

a curved or hooked stroke made with the pen, esp. as a component of an unfamiliar or unintelligible script or when learning to write; (also) a crooked character, a scrawl.

So the buildings resemble in their monotony the marks made by a boy learning the rudiments of handwriting, practicing the same stroke over and over. And those marks resemble the hooks suspended over a fireplace. The houses resemble the marks that resemble the hooks.

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)