[I have two heroes and one is Francis Grose. To me he is the preux chevalier of my craft (‘valiant knight’ say the translators and I take the encomium from Wodehouse who gave it to Bertie as an aspiration). I wrote of him a few weeks ago, but that was to note that even so all-embracing a lexicographer found it necessary to back off occasionally. For those who might like to enjoy a little more ( I have a niche, I know, but surely the rotund Captain G. o’erspills it) here it is. Tweaked a little from its origins in my 2014 history of slang Language.]
‘Perhaps Egan’s most original contribution was the eleven-page ‘Biographical Sketch of Francis Grose, Esq.’ The sources for this have vanished, and have come to be queried by modern researchers, but the picture he paints of the bonhomous, rotund lexicographer making his nightly tours of London’s taverns and rookeries, almost as a real-life precursor of Egan’s own fictional gents about town Tom and Jerry of Life in London fame (and given his supposed scholarship more their regular sidekick ‘the Oxonian’ and hedonist Bob Logic, than either of them) is undeniably appealing. ’
Green Language! (2014)
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Grose is one of slang lexicography’s most satisfyingly three-dimensional figures, certainly the first of such in a lineage too often forced to fall back, albeit in dealing with an elusive human biography rather than a rootless word, on the disappointing ‘etymology unknown’. If John S. Farmer would, a century on, be slang’s equivalent of the OED’s James Murray (the two corresponded regularly), then Grose in his era was slang’s Johnson. A cheery Johnson, by all account, a comfortably off Johnson (from his own salary and from inheritances), and seemingly a Johnson unafflicted with the Great Lexicographer’s problems of emotions and health. A less grand and influential Johnson, of course, although Grose had his own reputation within the world of antiquarianism.
‘A cowl does not make a monk’ reads the caption of this picture by Grose’s friend Nathaniel Hone. Grose makes his devotions to the alderman (though no chains visible), while his friend Theodosius Forrest, an author, balladeer, playwright and lawyer, stirs the punch with a crucifix. Thomas Rowlandson did a drawing but whether before or after the picture is unknown. Balzac, another fan of the robe and scapular, would have loved his habit.
Looking at his surviving portraits it is hard to resist at least a nod towards the fanciful thesis that an individual’s character is determined by his or her surname. Grose was indeed gross - and he apparently appreciated the pun, although he preferred others to resist it - an outsize figure in every way. A veritable Falstaff of lexicographers, whose servant allegedly strapped him into bed to prevent the covers slipping from his vast belly; he was well known for his conviviality and his consumption of porter (a dark, bitter beer à la Guinness). He was born in late 1730 or early 1731 in Broad Street, London. His father, also Francis, a Swiss from Berne, was a jeweller who fitted up the coronation crown either of George II, as suggested in the Gentleman’s Magazine, or George III as the DNB had it.
Grose jr. was classically educated, as was the contemporary custom, but preferred enrolment at William Shipley’s drawing school in the Strand to entering a university. In 1766 he was elected a member of the Incorporated Society of Artists; from 1755-63 he was Richmond Herald (a position purchased by his father); in 1757 he became a member of the Society of Antiquaries and in 1759 he was commissioned into the Surrey regiment of the militia. Becoming paymaster he declared, he needed only two account books: his left and right hip-pockets. Receipts went into the right one, and disbursements appeared from the left. It was a characteristically unfussy attitude, but perhaps not wholly prudent. ‘The unscrupulous’, says Partridge, ‘imposed upon him,’[1] and he became heavily indebted to his fellow officers. The regiment was disbanded in 1762, although his salary was continued. His income was boosted by his father’s death, in 1769, but his inheritance only lasted so long. (There was a further inheritance on his wife’s death in 1774). Grose was forced to rejoin the militia when in 1778 it was re-embodied and remained there, although in training camps rather than on active service, until 1783. He was also court-martialled in 1778, although the precise reason – presumably ‘some boyish prank’[2] – remains unknown. Whether or not as a result of this, he found himself, as he wrote to a fellow-antiquary, the solicitor William Hutchinson, ‘tied by the leg to the drudgery of the Drill, endeavouring to teach a parcel of awkward and vicious boobies their right hands from their left, without being able to steal one hour for the pencil’.[3] By the early 1780s these ‘onerous’ military duties had become increasingly nominal.
Parade-ground tedium notwithstanding, Grose had in fact always managed to find some time ‘for the pencil’. He had been an enthusiastic, if not outstandingly skilled sketcher of buildings since his late teens and the first part of his Views of the Antiquities of England and Wales appeared in 1773; the complete work was finished fifteen years later. He was responsible for many of the illustrations, although the text was created by a number of other hands. Two studies of military antiquities, of which he was especially knowledgeable, appeared between 1785-89. A trip to Scotland resulted in The Antiquities of Scotland (1789-91) and in 1791, after making a brief visit the previous year, he began what would have been The Antiquities of Ireland. It did not appear: on 12 May, while dining in Dublin with Horace Hone, a miniaturist and the son of his old friend the portrait-painter Nathaniel Hone, he suffered a fatal apoplectic fit. He is buried in the graveyard of Drumcondra Church, near Dublin. Noting his series of ‘Antiquities’, the St James Evening Chronicle suggested these lines as his epitaph:
‘Here lies Francis Grose,
On Thursday, May 12, 1791,
Death put an end to his
views and prospects.
His obituarist’s comments in the Gentleman’s Magazine, while fulsome, are echoed without reservation in many contemporary memoirs.
‘He had the earliest habits of adapting himself to all tempers; and, being a man of general knowledge, perpetually drew out some conversation that was either useful to himself or agreeable to the party. He could observe upon most things with precision and judgement; but his natural tendency was to humour, in which he excelled, both by the selection of anecdotes and his manner of telling them. It may be said, too, that his figure rather assisted him, which was in fact the very title page to a joke. He had neither pride nor malignity of authorship; he felt the independency of his own talents, and was satisfied with them, without degrading others. His friendships were of the same cast, constant and sincere, overlooking little faults, and seeking out greater virtues. he had a good heart, and, abating those little indiscretions natural to most men, could do no wrong.’[4]
Like Johnson Grose established his own coterie, which met in a specially reserved private room on the premises of his publisher Samuel Hooper’s bookshop in High Holborn. A variety of literary figures joined him there to enjoy his wit and anecdotes. He was also a patron of a Holborn tavern, the King’s Arms, a popular haunt of literary men, journalists, actors and similar figures. Unlike Johnson, however, Grose was especially happy in Scotland. His antiquarian researches had taken him north in 1789 and soon, while meeting a variety of fellow devotees, he was introduced to the poet Robert Burns. The two men hit it off at once, and Burns capped their acquaintance with a poem: ‘On Captain Grose’s Peregrinations Through Scotland’, a tribute that includes the oft-quoted couplet ‘A chiel’s among ye, takin notes / And, faith, he’ll prent it’. The ‘chiel’ was 58, hardly infantine at that or any time. In this same poem he describes the Falstaffian Captain as ‘a fine, fat, fodgel [squat and plump] wight / of stature short, but genius bright’. Burns’ affection for this friend who displayed such a ‘sterling independence of mind’[5] is displayed once more in the later ‘Ken Ye ought o’ Captain Grose?’:
‘The Devil got notice that Grose was a-dying
So whip! at the summons old Satan came flying:
But when he approach’d where poor francis lay moaning,
And saw each bed-post with its burden a-groaning,
Astonish’d, confounded, cry’d Satan: “By God,
I’ll want him, ere I take such a damnable load!”.’
It was also in honour of his friend’s powers as a story-teller that Burns wrote the ghostly narrative poem Tam O’Shanter, his last major work, in 1791.
As the quintessential ‘jolly fat man with a heart of gold’ Grose, weighed down by his bulk, and tired out by his pursuit of good company and the pleasures of the table, needed a good deal of sleep. Indeed, his legend stresses his partiality to such relaxation. Grose himself once declared that he was ‘the idlest fellow living, even before I had acquired the load of adventitious matter which at present stuffs my doublet’.[6] When one member of the Antiquarian Society drew Grose’s portrait, he appended these lines:
‘Now *****, like bright Phoebus, is sunk into rest,
Society droops for the loss of his jest;
Antiquarian debates, unoccasion’d with mirth,
To genius and learning will never give birth.
Then wake, brother member, our friend from his sleep,
Lest Apollo should frown, and Bacchus should weep’.
He was, naturally, also a trencherman of renown. In the ‘Biographical Sketch’ attached to his edition of the Classical Dictionary, Pierce Egan describes Grose’s meeting, in Dublin, with a butcher, who was requesting him to make some kind of purchase. Grose refused to buy, saying that he ‘wanted nothing’ but ‘at last a butcher starts from his stall and, eyeing Grose’s figure from top to bottom...exclaimed, “Well, sir, though you don’t want anything at present, only say you buy your meat of me; and by G-- you’ll make my fortune”.’[7]
In its notice of his death, the Gentleman’s Magazine praised Grose’s antiquarianism, and delighted in his good nature, but turned fastidiously from his slang lexicography, allowing only that ‘in 1785 he published “A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue” which it would have been to his credit to have suppressed’[8]
It passes without even a denunciation over his Provincial Glossary (1788). (The New DNB is no more interested and dismisses the works in two lines). Yet at two centuries’ remove, it is as a lexicographer, as much as an antiquary, that he matters. This is naturally less so at the Society of Antiquaries in London which holds most of his papers. Slang materials are absent, although there is a list of his personal library: nothing very counter-linguistic, but a good many dictionaries, including his predecessor B.E., whose dictionary of ‘The Canting Crew’appeared in 1699 and an anonymous work, again focused on cant, of 1725.
Building on B.E., but appealing to a much wider audience, and providing them with a substantially larger word-list, Grose’s work made it even more clear that there was more to slang than the professional jargon of thieves and beggars. Cant’s usual suspects are duly rounded up – abram-cove, autem bawler, bawdy basket, bene darkmans and their roguish like – all culled from the sixteenth-century glossaries, but like B.E. he has taken on board the larger world of general slang. In Grose the reader has moved beyond the surreptitious whispering of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century villainy and into the wider arena, where respectable cits as well as villainy’s queer coves, use the ‘parallel’ vocabulary of slang. It is in Grose that readers first discover birthday suit (although Smollett appears to have been the actual coiner), chop and change, gam (a leg, long since exported to America), shag (to copulate), slag (a pejorative common to the twentieth-century works of both Frank Norman and Robin Cook) and much, much more.
What Grose had done was to remove slang from its association with criminals and put it, with a much enlarged lexis, into the mouths of the common people. On occasion he did this literally, taking terms that had been labelled as cant and re-defining them as ‘vulgar’. Like B.E. he finds a place for a good deal of what would now be defined as occupational jargon, whether the words of soldiers and sailors or those of Billingsgate fishwives, long-celebrated – typically in Ned Ward’s London Spy of 1699-1700 – for the acerbity not to mention coarseness of their epithets. For Grose this vulgar tongue was an essential part of British freedom: in this case of speech. Not for Britain the artificial restraints of the Académie française and similar ‘un-British’ institutions. The actor David Garrick had praised his friend Johnson for his success when with his Dictionary he had ‘beat forty French and could beat forty more’ (the number being that of the members of the Académie). Grose’s dictionary, while unsung, attained a similar image of Britishness.
Slang is a man-made language, a gendered vocabulary that while it does not exclude women, is keen to keep them in their place: the nagging wife, the sexy ingénue, the whore, the hag. Grose embraces this wholeheartedly, perhaps most obviously in his self-censored entry at ‘C**t: a nasty name for a nasty thing.’ As Janet Sorenson[9] notes, the dictionary offers many examples of intra-male socialising, with terms and definitions that underline the locker-room misogyny of such relationships. Typically he offers 37 other synonyms for the monosyllable, including the bite, Buckinger’s boot, Hans Carvel’s Ring, the man-trap and the miraculous pitcher (that holds water with its mouth down). The penis is good for only 17, and as ever in slang, they tend to the self-congratulatory: the matrimonial peacemaker, the sugar-stick and the arbor vitae. This was no longer a language for mixed company. Although the pirated edition of his work, the Lexicon Balatronicum, suggested that one could in fact use such terms since ‘it is impossible that a woman should understand the meaning of twiddle diddles, or rise at the table at the mention of Buckinger’s boot.’[10] Respectable women may have chosen or perhaps pretended to agree but the whores that the male readers frequented and for whom the Lexicon gives seventy synonyms, might have begged to differ.
This maleness also reflects another change: the increasing importance of the city as a coiner of language. The city with its speed, its constant change, is another image of masculinity. The country, where tradition and nature ruled, was seen as more feminine. Egan’s best-selling Life in London (1821), and its several clones, show the way that a city-based male society could cross classes in its movement around town; and that the language of high life and low could be the same. As Egan’s hero Corinthian Tom, the epitome of the knowing city sophisticate, explains to his up-from-the-country friend Jerry Hawthorn: ‘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.’
The sporting journalist Pierce Egan (the weekly fistic record Boxiana, the half-fiction, half metropolitan documentary, Life in London, arguably the country’s first-ever best-seller, plus a similarly titled weekly newspaper) who would issue his own revision of Grose’s final edition (1796) in 1823, provides us with a pleasingly characterful introduction. In pursuit of slang his Grose rotund, tipsy, surely eying barmaid and beauty alike - had made his way ‘from one end of the metropolis to the other’. He may have taken slang out of the ‘padding-ken’ and placed it more firmly in the public eye, but in one aspect of his lexicography he was linked most definitely to his predecessors. Modern slang collection tends, like its mainstream equivalents, to rely on the printed text for its researches. Such twentieth-century specialists as the late David Maurer have indeed pursued hands-on fieldwork, eliciting slang, or more properly cant, from a wide variety of criminal or quasi-criminal sources, but they remain the exception. The nature of historical dictionaries, slang or otherwise, is to depend on print and eschew oral evidence.
Grose would have had none of that. He picked up much of his research firsthand during his nightly wanderings through London’s criminal slums, accompanied, so it has been claimed, only by his man Batch (might we ponder a prototype Jeeves?) and later by his companion, ‘a funny fellow’ properly named Tom Cocking, whom he christened ‘The Guinea Pig’ and, as explained in the introduction to the Antiquities of Scotland (1789) was ‘a young man who promises to make an accurate draughtsman.’ That being so, Cocking, ‘under my inspection’ drew some 20 pictures for the book. He wandered the low-life streets of London, or indeed whatever town in which he might temporarily find himself, in search of the echt vocabulary of the street. It was these wanderings that inspired his work.
His book went into several editions: that of 1785 (we should presume a run of 1500, average for the era) was followed by another, a major expansion, in 1788 and a third, posthumously, in 1796, by which time the original 3,000 headwords had been increased to 4,000. This third edition was pirated (and only marginally expanded) in 1811, when its title page declared it to be ‘a Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence’. Retitled as the Lexicon Balatronicum (‘the jesters’ dictionary’), it acknowledged Grose’s original efforts, but cited this edition as being ‘considerably altered and enlarged, with the modern changes and improvements, by a Member of the Whip Club’. The Lexicon also claims to be targeting a classier audience than did Grose whose ‘circulation was confined almost exclusively to the lower orders of society. [Captain Grose] was not aware...that our young men of fashion would at no very distant period be as distinguished for the vulgarity of their jargon as the inhabitants of Newgate...’ However the real target was the uninitiated, ‘the cits of Fish-Street [and] the boors of Brentford...the whole tribe of second rate Bang ups’ who were to be ‘initiated into all the peculiarities of language by which the man of spirit is distinguished from the man of worth. They may now talk bawdy before their papas, without the fear of detection, and abuse their less spirited companions, who prefer a good dinner at home to a glorious up-shot in the highway, without the hazard of a cudgelling.’[12]
In 1823 Egan himself brought out what was a fourth ‘official’ edition, with more revisions, often reflecting the relatively new ‘flash’ language of the Regency sporting world which as a sporting journalist and the best-selling author of Life in London (1821) he was an expert. In addition he cut the ‘coarse and broad expressions’[13] which Grose had allowed and notes the way that some slang terminology, typically rum - once a positive term, but by 1820 generally the reverse – had altered.
[1] E. Partridge (ed.) Classical Dict. Of the Vulgar Tongue (London, 1931) p.381
[2] Partridge op.cit. p.381
[3] Partridge op.cit. p.382
[4] Gentleman’s Magazine, June 1791 I:581
[5] quoted in Partridge op.cit. p 384
[6] Partridge op.cit. p.387
[7] Egan’s Grose (London, 1823) intro. p.xxxix
[8] Gentleman’s Magazine, June 1791 I:493
[9] Sorenson op.cit. p.447
[10] Lexicon Balatronicum intro. p.vii.
[11] Egan’s Grose intro. pp. xxvi-xxvii
[12] Lexicon Balatronicum (London, 1811) p.vi
[13] Egan’s Grose intro p.xxi