Low Talk
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.
By Captain Francis Grose. Edited by Eric
Partridge. (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 45s.) EVERYBODY has heard of Dr. Johnson's dic- tionary, which is now not much more than a curiosity piece, while few know Grose's dic- tionary, which provides a unique anthology of eighteenth-century underworld slang. Grose, a friend of Burns, was not a scientific lexi- cographer; he was not unduly concerned with the history of words, nor with the completeness of his dictionary. He collected words he remem- bered from his reading and his night-time excur- sions about Drury Lane and Covent Garden, and although he suggests in a preface that his work will be useful to foreigners and provincials, there is more of the wit than the pedagogue in his glosses. For example: WHORE-MONGER: A man that keeps more than one mistress. A country gentleman who kept a female friend, being reproved by the par- son of the parish, and styled a whore-monger, asked the parson whether he had cheese in his house; and being answered in the affirmative, 'Pray,' says he, 'does that one cheese make you a cheese-monger?'
This is learned jesting; more often the humour is coarse and cryptic:
BUTCHER'S DOG: To be like a butcher's dog, i.e. lie by the beef without touching it; a •. simile often applicable to married men.
Slang fills the gaps left by standard usage, and-
it reveals those obsessions which polite writing skims over. But it is also the language of avoid= ance, and if the two obsessions of the eighteenth- century, underworld were hanging and whores, they are never referred to directly. Hanging is 'to dance the Paddington Frisk,' to 'have hempen fever,' to `be frummagemmed' and a score more. 'You'll be scragged, ottomised, and grin in a glass case' meant you'll be hanged, anatomised, and your skeleton kept in a glass case at Sur- geons' Hall, a probable end for murderers. And as with hanging, whores and venereal disease were joked away. But the horror lies close to the joke, and a long way from pre-Renaissance, pre-syphilitic England. 'He suffered by a blow over the snout with a French faggot stick'; i.e., he lost his nose by the pox. Sex is invariably associated with disease or money, usually in the most roundabout way, as 'he broke his shins against Covent Garden rails,' a phrase that might Puzzle both foreigners and provincials.
It is as though Hogarth's characters were talk- ing, and, as with Hogarth, one gets a glimpse of the cruelty of popular entertainments:
MUMBLE A SPARROW : A cruel sport practised at wakes and fairs, in the following manner: A Cock sparrow whose wings are clipped, is put into the crown of a hat; a man having his arms tied behind him, attempts to bite off the sparrow's head, but is generally obliged to desist, by the many pecks and pinches he re- ceives from the enraged bird.
As social history, as a study in group psy- chology, or simply as a collection of vivid metaphors, Grose's dictionary is fascinating material. Eric Partridge, who has done for this century what Grose did for the eighteenth, ex- pands the original commentaries and adds the etymologies which Grose often omitted. This edition is a new impression of a small edition that Partridge produced in 1931. I have only one quibble. Why reprint the corrigenda and consideranda that Partridge inserted in the first edition? To reprint those of Grose would be irritating, but academically justifiable. Actually to bind into the book Partridge's trifling mis- takes, together with a page advertising them, is Pedantic nonsense.
JOHN DANIEL
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