Tag: Victorian

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Ephemera Food & Drink Victorian

Vintage recipes – Christmas Pudding, 1884

Hieroglyphic Magazine, 1884

A proper Victorian Christmas Pudding recipe, from Hieroglyphic, a tiny little magazine-style pamphlet from 1884. It’s not so much a magazine though, as an extended promotional piece for a company called Goodall’s, and its various wares. Note their custard is sold by “…all grocers and oilmen throughout the United Kingdom.” Oilmen?

Hieroglyphic cover, 1884
Hieroglyphic cover, 1884
Hieroglyphic Magazine, 1884
Hieroglyphic Magazine, 1884

Christmas Pudding

Materials –
One pound of raisins;
One pound of currants;
One pound of beef suet;
Half a pound of moist sugar;
Half a pound of flour;
One pound of breadcrumbs;
Four eggs;
One gill of rum, brandy or whisky;
Half a pint of milk;
Quarter of a pound of citron;
Quarter of a pound of candied lemon-peel.

Process –
Stone the raisins, wash the currants thoroughly, chop the beef suet as fine as possible, cut the peel into small strips, and place these ingredients, with the sugar, flour, breadcrumbs and eggs, in a large bowl, pour the milk over them, and mix until the whole is well incorporated. Lastly, add the spirit; stir the mass again for a few minutes, tie it up in well-floured pudding-cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and boil for four or five hours. This should be done the day before the pudding is wanted, on the following day, boil for two or three hours more. A rich plum-pudding of this kind cannot be boiled too long, the longer it is boiled, the more wholesome it is.

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Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week – Crapping Case

The Slang Dictionary, 1865

Yes, this is just what you’d expect.

Crapping Case, the closet of decency.

Also – Crapped meaning “hanged”.

The Slang Dictionary, 1865
The Slang Dictionary, 1865
Categories
Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week – Cabbagehead

The Slang Dictionary, 1865

More head insults! Cabbagehead – a soft-headed person.

Also, Cabobble – an excellent word from Suffolk meaning to confuse, and it really does sound like a muddled head.

The Slang Dictionary, 1865
The Slang Dictionary, 1865
Categories
Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week – Golopshus

Golopshus – well, this is a word that can be used to describe itself. It’s rather a golupshus word from Norwich meaning splendid, delicious and luscious.

Slang-Dictionary-golopshus

It reminds me more than anything else of the unique wordysmith talents of Professor Stanley Unwin. Here he is describing Patrick Troughton’s era of Doctor Who. Deep joy.

 

 

 

Categories
Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week – Funking the Cobbler

Funking the cobbler – a kid’s trick involving the pungent spice asafoetida, also known as Devil’s Dung (nice). The spice was stuffed with cotton into a cow’s horn (everyone had a cow’s horn to hand in the nineteenth century), set alight, and the smoke blown through a keyhole or into the aforementioned cobbler’s stall.

In short, it’s an early kind of stinkbomb, perenially popular with schoolboys. I feel safe in this gender assumption having sat on a fair number of buses that have fallen victim to a gang of lads chucking a stinkbomb on just before the doors close, while we poor saps sit there choking for the rest of the journey. This is especially great if you’re pregnant and your sense of smell has basically become a superpower.

Grrrr! *shakes fist in the manner of an annoyed cobbler*

Slang-Dictionary-funking-the-cobbler

Categories
Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week – Fly the Kite

The Slang Dictionary, 1865

If you google it, it seems there are a huge number of meanings for the slang term “Fly the kite”. There’s two on this page of The Slang Dictionary – the first refers to obtaining money on (usually worthless) cheques.

The second is the one that fascinates me, though:
“Fly the kite”, To evacuate from a window – term used in padding-kens, or low lodging houses”

Erm. So your, shall we say, number one is the string and you, up there at the window, are the kite. I presume your average low lodging house wasn’t exactly well equipped with privies, and maybe even chamber pots were too luxurious for these dives?

Slang-Dictionary-1865-flythekite

Categories
Victorian Women

Victorian Child-Rearing Theory, 1891

Mothers Companion, 1891

The Victorians attitude to children could be pretty strict, as seen in a rather heart-breaking little section of The Mother’s Companion of 1891. It’s written with a loving tone – these parents adored their kids. And yet how far removed from today is the idea that a parent should withhold all praise from their children, for fear of making them conceited?

The heart-breaking bit isn’t really the piece itself, which is pretty cuddly. But it’s the fact that it actually needs to tell parents to admire their children’s achievements that is shocking to a twenty-first century parent – “Of course, I do not mean too much praise, but a little now and then is good for everyone.”

And I do like this sentimental childhood bit – “Flood them with sunshine from your own hearts, and they will give it back to you with interest.”

Categories
Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week – Tom and Jerry (and Daffy)

The Slang Dictionary, 1865

Tom and Jerry – a slang term that has made its mark, perhaps like no other, throughout popular culture. And one intertwined with The Slang Dictionary itself.

Tom and Jerry are now most famously the cartoon cat and mouse, of course, but the term was also used to refer to British and German soldiers in the Second World War – or the “Tommies” and the “Jerries”. In popular culture, it was the original stage name of Simon and Garfunkel and also the male characters in The Good Life.

But perhaps the phrase originated in 1821 from a journal called Life in London by Pierce Egan, which had a couple of flash characters called Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn who embarked on laddish sprees around London. They were also accompanied by another friend, Bob Logic, but he’s rather gone by the wayside in slang terms. Life in London ran until 1828 and was hugely popular. There was an offshoot stage show, and even a drink called “Tom and Jerry” devised by Egan to promote the show. This cocktail – a kind of hot eggnog and brandy concoction – is actually still around as a traditional Christmas seasonal drink in parts of the US.

Pierce Egan was also the editor of the 1823 slang dictionary Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. This preceded the slang dictionary I own, which was compiled by John Camden Hotten in 1865.

Corinthian Tom refers to the dictionary in Life in London,

“A kind of cant phraseology is current from one end of the Metropolis to the other, and you will scarcely be able to move a single step, my dear JERRY, without consulting a Slang Dictionary, or having some friend at your elbow to explain the strange expressions which, at every turn, will assail your ear.”

In more intertwining, John Camden Hotten himself brought out a reprint of Life in London in 1869. And by the time he had published his own slang dictionary in 1865, Tom and Jerry meant a lowdown drinking den, a gin palace (probably because these were exactly the types of places frequented by Corianthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn). And, to add to the cartoony slang, Daffy meant gin.

The Slang Dictionary, 1865
The Slang Dictionary, 1865

Pictures of Life in London can be found on the brilliant Spitalfields Life blog – http://spitalfieldslife.com/2012/03/28/tom-jerrys-life-in-london/

Categories
Victorian

Legitimate Laziness, 1891

Laziness isn’t exactly a trait we associate with the Victorians. The work ethic was lauded, days off were few and sloth was, after all, one of the seven deadly sins.

Poor sloth.

Nooo! I iz not a deadly sin!
Nooo! I iz not a deadly sin!

On the other hand, I’m a big fan of laziness. I remember, in a life I had pre-kids, that I used to be a very big fan of sleeping. I wish I could do more of it now. And people banging on about how very busy they are just makes me tired on their behalf. So I rather enjoy children’s author Isabel Suart Robson’s paean to laziness in The Mother’s Companion, 1891. It’s also interesting to see that workers never fully detaching from work isn’t just a modern problem caused by email and mobile phones. In 1891, there were still those businessmen who couldn’t go on holiday without being a slave to their letters and telegraphs too.

The Mother's Companion, 1891
The Mother’s Companion, 1891
Categories
Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week – Snobstick and a lot of Snot

The Slang Dictionary, 1865

This is a great page of The Slang Dictionary.

First you’ve got Snob-stick – a worker who refuses to join in strikes, and what would now be termed a “scab”.

Then there’s Snooks-and-Walker, a number game I was certainly still playing in the 90s, except it was a drinking game called “Fizz Buzz” (and the entry also says “see Buz” so that variant is also an ancient one).

Then there’s a glorious variety of snot-based words. Snottinger for a pocket handkerchief is a good one. But Snotter or Wipe-Hauler is a peculiar one. In other slang books, these terms are simply referred to as meaning a pickpocket who has a particular fancy for the aforementioned snottingers (it takes all sorts). But here it goes into a little more detail:

Snotter, or Wipe-hauler, a pickpocket who commits great depredations upon gentlemen’s pocket-handkerchiefs.

Well, maybe that just means nicking them. But is that all it means? It sounds strangely fetishistic to me.

Lastly, my fave – Snooze. Obviously this slang stuck around and still means the same thing now, but just look at the vulgar pronunciation of it – Snoodge. Isn’t that wonderful? I’m planning to bring this one back, ideally as Rowan Atkinson would say it.

Anyway, it’s Monday morning and I’ve already pressed snoodge twice. Time to get up….

The Slang Dictionary, 1865
The Slang Dictionary, 1865