by Daniel Pool
battalion—A subdivision of a regiment.
batter pudding—A floury concoction made with grease or drippings, of which Yorkshire pudding was one variety.
battery—A gun emplacement.
battledore and shuttlecock—A game like badminton, played on the lawn with a shuttlecock (the feathered thing you hit) and the battledore (the thing you whacked it with).
battue—A French term to describe the large outings for shooting that became popular with sportsmen in the 1820s and then again toward the middle of the century. Characteristically, battues involved having beaters drive huge numbers of game in front of the sportsmen.
Bathing machines.
bazaar—An institution apparently originating after the Napoleonic Wars, in which distressed widows and orphans of veterans were given free stalls in which to sell things in an open-air marketplace in London, fashionable ladies thereafter evidently taking it upon themselves to patronize bazaars as a charitable endeavor.
beadle—The parish officer whom Dickens caricatures so memorably in the person of Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist. The beadle was basically the general assistant to the parish beadle, the man deputed to assist the constable in keeping order, or to help the overseer of the poor look after the poverty stricken. Sometimes he turns up with his hand out for a gratuity in the aftermath of a wedding; it was also his task to “Sssh!” people in church. Some parishes hired them to help run the workhouse after the New Poor Law was passed in 1834. His uniform included an impressive staff and a cocked hat trimmed in gold lace—an old-fashioned form of dress which suggests that the office was becoming an anachronism. A beadle must have done something to outrage Dickens at some point; it is hard to find one of his major novels in which he does not take a poke at them.
beck—A stream or a brook.
bedesmen—People who said their “beads,” that is, poor people who prayed for someone who had endowed a chapel or almshouse for their support. Hence, the inmates of a privately financed or endowed charitable institution.
Bazaar in the Shire-Hall, Worcester.
Bedlam—A contraction for the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, an insane asylum that was run by the City of London, eventually from a location in Lambeth.
beerhouse—A place where one could sell beer for payment of an annual fee of two guineas, promoted by the government in the 1830s to divert the poor from gin and make beer easier to sell than it was through the alehouses.
beeswax—Just what it says it is. Produced by bees as they go about constructing their hives, it was the favorite material for making the best quality candles (tallow, by comparison, had to be snuffed constantly). Also sometimes recommended for application to floors before balls.
beggar my neighbor—The card game played by Pip, appropriately, the first time he meets Estella at Miss Havisham’s old house. Two players divided the deck between them and then they took turns, turning over their top cards. When one of them turned up an ace, king, queen or jack, the other had to give him, respectively, four, three, two or one of his own cards, the winner being the person who ended up with all the cards as they played out their hands. However, if the person who had to give up his cards to the player with the ace or face cards himself turned up a court card, then the other had to play to that card, and so on.
Belgrave Square—A ritzy area of London, in the West End, but south of Hyde Park, newer and slightly less fashionable than Mayfair.
Belgrave Square.
bench—Upper case, the “Bench” collectively were the judges of England. Lower case, the term in parliamentary circles referred to the long benches on which the members of the House of Commons sat, the party in power sitting on the benches at the right hand of the Speaker, facing the Opposition, who sat on the other side of the aisle. Members with prominent positions in the ministry sat on the frontmost bench, which was called the Treasury Bench (the prime minister being invariably also first lord of the treasury). The rank and file behind them were the “backbenchers.”
bencher—A senior, governing member of an Inn of Court.
bender—A sixpence.
benefice—A “living,” that is, a post as a parish vicar or rector in the Church of England.
benefit of clergy—A rapidly disappearing privilege in the 1800s. In the old, old days, the lay courts turned clergy suspected of various crimes over to ecclesiastical courts for trial instead of subjecting them to secular punishment. Hence the term. It was assumed thereafter in a society where literacy was largely confined to clerics that anyone who could read must be of the clergy. As a consequence, convicted thieves and murderers who could read got “benefit of clergy” and could thus get their thumbs branded instead of being executed. The government then systematically began making various crimes not “clergyable” and in 1827 the privilege vanished altogether. As late as 1822, however, manslaughter, no matter how horrible the circumstances, was clergyable.
bergamot—A citrus tree or a fancy pear.
berlin—A kind of big four-wheel carriage with a hood. Also the name of a certain kind of fancy wool used for knitting and for making a kind of glove.
besom—Twigs of various trees or shrubs gathered together and made into a broom.
bespeak—To order something, like a dinner. Also, to ask a favor—as in, to “bespeak a dance.”
bilberry—A shrub found in moors and other waste places that produced a small bluish berry and a pretty flower. In, Wuthering Heights Catherine is buried in a churchyard corner where “the wall is so low that heath and bilberry plants have climbed over it.” Also called a whortleberry or a blueberry, it was edible. Jane Eyre munches on them at one point on a heath when she runs short of money.
billet—A lodging for a soldier. Also a brief note.
Billingsgate—The name of the big fish market in London. Tempers were at one time so short and the language so strong there that the term became a synonym for wildly abusive language.
bill—The term for a piece of legislation in Parliament before it became law. (After which it was called an “act.”) Also, the legal document with which someone initiated a lawsuit in the Chancery Court. Finally, “bill” was short for a bill of exchange.
bill broker—A man who bought and sold bills of exchange.
bill of exchange—Originally used only by merchants, it was not unlike a check. Merchant A out in the country instructed Merchant B in London to whom he had sent goods to pay C an amount equal to the value of the goods on such and such a date. B agreed by writing “accepted” across this written instruction from Merchant A; the result was a bill of exchange. From being a technique used by merchants, however, the use of bills broadened into a way for private individuals short of cash to raise money. Either you wrote the bill out instructing yourself to pay or, if your credit was lousy, you wrote out instructions to a friend with good credit to play the part of Merchant B and pay a C to whom you owed money or from whom you were borrowing. This second arrangement was called an “accommodation bill.” Where you agreed to pay, say, £500 to the moneylender to whom you made out the bill but only received £300 from him, the bill was said to be “discounted.”
bill of sale—A document giving rights in household furniture and other similar personal property. It worked like a mortgage; one gave a bill of sale on one’s household goods to the person from whom one borrowed cash and if one didn’t repay him in time he took the goods.
bills of mortality—A district of London, so called because within its boundaries bills, or lists, of the dead were published during a great plague in the late 1500s.
bishop—A member of the highest of the three orders in the Church of England, a bishop ranked right under the two archbishops who ran the church. There were some thirty bishops in England by the end of the 1800s. Most of them sat in the House of Lords and exercised jurisdiction over a diocese from their seat in a cathedral town. One addressed them as “Right Reverend” or “My Lord.” “Bishop” was also the name of an alcoholic beverage, composed of hot red wine
poured over bitter oranges with sugar and spices added. “I’ll raise your salary and endeavour to assist your struggling family,” says the reformed Scrooge to a bewildered Bob Cratchit at the end of A Christmas Carol, “and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!”
bitters—Various kinds of alcoholic concoctions of supposedly medicinal benefit in which things like orange peels or wormwood had been steeped.
blackbird—An English songbird that was a thrush and not the same as the American bird by that name.
Blackfriars—The area between Ludgate Hill and the Thames.
blacking—The substance used to black shoes. Dickens was put to work in a factory putting labels on bottles of blacking when he was about twelve and never forgot the misery of the experience. Apparently blacking came off in the rain, too. It was sometimes sold in the form of cakes wrapped in paper.
blacklead—A type of graphite—not lead at all—used for polishing grates.
black pudding—A sausage made with blood and various other ingredients, the blood spread on the outside giving it its name. Sometimes called “blood pudding” or, in Hardy, “blackpot.”
blood pudding—The same as black pudding.
blucher—A half boot.
blue—The color had a number of quite specific associations in nineteenth-century Britain, being, notably, the color associated with the Tories and, subsequently, the Conservatives. (Yellow was the Whigs’ color.) It was also the varsity color at Oxford, Cambridge, Eton and Harrow, and it was the color of the ribbon worn by members of the Order of the Garter.
bluebag—The bag carried by barristers.
blue books—The books of parliamentary commissions of inquiry (so called from the color of their covers) that investigated and reformed every conceivable institution in nineteenth-century England including Oxford and Cambridge.
bluebottle—A big fly with a bluish body.
blue pill—A pill supposed to counteract bile, made up of glycerin, honey, and mercury.
Blues—Nickname of the Royal Horse Guards, one of the three regiments of Household Cavalry that guarded the sovereign and were among the most prestigious in the country.
blunderbuss—A short gun with a wide barrel that blew shot in all directions when it was fired.
board—As used in Oliver Twist, it is short for board of guardians, i.e., the local officials charged in a given district with responsibility for the poor, including running the workhouse, by the Poor Law of 1834. Their functions were previously performed by the overseers of the poor.
boarding school—Very popular in the nineteenth century. Boys boarded at Eton and Rugby, but the term was also used with reference to academies for young ladies, like Miss Pinkerton’s (Vanity Fair), where girls were often sent after they had been taught everything that a governess could think of. There were also “for profit” boarding schools like the ghastly Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire described in Nicholas Nickleby. In contrast to Rugby and Eton, these were profit-making places, often started by men who had failed in some other line of work. Places way in the north of England like Dotheboys Hall were particularly attractive to wealthy parents whose child might be illegitimate; Yorkshire was far from London and it was cheap.
Board of Trade—A government department (formally a committee of the Privy Council) whose chief was called a president and who generally sat in the cabinet. The board looked after railroads and the merchant marine.
boatswain—Pronounced bo’sun. A warrant officer, that is, neither an ordinary seaman nor a commissioned officer but in between. He was in charge of the sails and rigging and blew a whistle to call the sailors to their tasks.
bob—Slang for a shilling. “Bob had but fifteen ‘Bob’ a week himself,” says Dickens of Bob Cratchit; “he pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his Christian name.”
bodkin—To sit bodkin was to sit in between two people on a seat meant to hold only two.
bolus—A round tablet of medicine meant for swallowing that was bigger than a pill.
bombazine—A favorite black material for ladies’ mourning clothes. It absorbed light instead of reflecting it and was generally made out of worsted or worsted plus some other fabric. It was considered somewhat old-fashioned during the latter part of the century.
Bond Street—A fashionable shopping street in the West End of London, located in the Mayfair district.
bonne—A nursemaid.
bonnet—An obligatory outdoor head covering for all women in the first part of the century. It was evidently often worn with a shawl, and came in innumerable varieties, including the poke bonnet, the coal scuttle, the tilt bonnet (apparently resembling the tilt on a waggon) and the kiss-me-quickly, popular in the 1860s. By the latter part of the century fashionable women were wearing hats instead, and the garment survived only among the poor.
Book of Common Prayer—Declared the official prayer book for the Church of England by act of Parliament in the 1500s. It was called “common” because it replaced a variety of prayer books that had been used in different parts of the country. It contained the text for various services, such as marriage and the burial of the dead, plus the catechism and the psalms. It is written in a rich Elizabethan English and aspects of the services have passed into the language. “Give peace in our time” and “to love, cherish, and obey” come from the Prayer Book, as it was called.
boot—A place in a coach where luggage was put.
bootjack—A device used to remove boots.
boots—A servant at an inn or hotel whose job was to clean the guests’ boots. In Pickwick we find him bringing in the luggage.
borough—A town that had been granted certain rights of self-government by the Crown, so that, typically, it had a mayor, aldermen, and council, elected by the freemen or burgesses. References to the borough in connection with London, e.g., in Dickens, refer to Southwark. Thomas Hardy’s “Casterbridge” was a borough. Some boroughs were so independent that they virtually opted out of the county government and had their own quarter sessions run by an official called a recorder instead of by justices of the peace. Thackeray provides a fanciful origin for one such grant of municipal rights in Vanity Fair: “It is related, with regard to the borough of Queen’s Crawley, that Queen Elizabeth in one of her progresses, stopping at Crawley to breakfast, was so delighted with some remarkably fine Hampshire beer which was then presented to her by the Crawley of the day (a handsome gentleman with a trim beard and a good leg), that she forthwith erected Crawley into a borough to send two members to parliament.” Which brings up the matter of parliamentary representation. Some boroughs could send members to Parliament, as the counties all did. However, by the 1800s, the parliamentary boroughs and the municipal boroughs were often no longer the same. A large urban area might have one mayor but be divided into several parliamentary boroughs, while some once populous boroughs that still sent representatives to Parliament might have become so depopulated as to be virtually representing villages.
bottom—Of a dance—the opposite of the top.
bound over—To “bind over” was to prevent two quarrelsome people from injuring one another by requiring each to post a sum with the local court that would be forfeit if he caused any trouble.
boudoir—Today, the term carries some suggestion of an intimate bedroom area. However, in the 1800s, the term designated a room set aside for a lady to write her letters, conduct household business, and do such other things as were necessary to the running of the household and the public side of her life.
bowler—The hat that is called a derby in the United States. It was a big hit when it was introduced in Britain in 1868 because it was better ventilated and lighter than the top hats men wore until then.
Bow Street Runners (also known as the Robin Redbreasts because of their scarlet waistcoats)—The predecessors of the London bobbies. Created by the novelist Henry Fielding and his brother John in 1750, the Runners did detective work. Since they worked for fees an
d rewards, there were occasionally hints of corruption about their activities. They investigate Oliver Twist’s break-in and descend on the countryside of Pip’s childhood to investigate the murder of Mrs. Joe Gargery. (Their operations were not restricted to London.) They went out of existence in 1839.
box, Christmas—It was customary for people to fill up small boxes with money before Christmas. On the first weekday after Christmas they would then give them to those, like servants, who had helped them during the year, or to the poor. The day the box was given was called Boxing Day. “I remembered,” says Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights, “how old Earnshaw used to come in when all was tidied, and call me a cant lass, and slip a shilling into my hand as a Christmas box.”
Boxing Day—See box, Christmas.
boxseat—The large boxlike seat on which the coachman sat while driving a carriage. In the early days of coaching, young bucks used to bribe the coachman so they could sit up on the seat and “take the wheel,” a practice that was discouraged in view of their invariable tendency to speed. “Keep the box for me, Leader,” says Sir Pitt Crawley to the coachman on his way back to the ancestral home, to which the coachman replies, “ ‘Yes, Sir Pitt,’ with a touch of his hat, and rage in his soul (for he had promised the box to a young gentleman from Cambridge, who would have given a crown to a certainty).”
brace—A brace of something meant two of them, usually with a suggestion of a matching pair if it was something like a brace of pistols, although one could also have a brace of (presumably unmatched) pheasants.
braces—Suspenders.
bracken—A fern, sometimes a group of ferns. Sometimes used as bedding, and sheep ate young bracken.
Bradshaw—The schedule for trains in England, first issued in 1839.
brake—It was either a fern or a little bunch of bushes.
brawn—A food word. Brawn was the flesh of a hog or a boar, especially after it had had spice added to it, been pickled, etc.
