Journal

I’ve been doing a bit of research into 18th century medicine. Like most things in the 18th century it evolves from the end of superstition through to beginnings of science.

I’m still very much working on it but, during the course of things I found the Pharmacopeia Extemporanea, produced in English by a Thomas Fuller from an earlier Latin edition in 1710. A Pharmacopeia, in case you didn’t know, is a recipe book for medicines. As is my wont, I have divided it up and put it in a searchable database.

Have a look at the indexed version and the database search. The latter is very useful if you are interested in what particular ingredients were used for.

I haven’t linked Medicine into the rest of the site yet but help yourself to a sneak preview.

Oh yes, and I’ve done more of the interminable task of putting Thieves Cant into subject categories and have nearly finished Vaux’s glossary.

Thank you to my visitors from now 50 countries. I hadn’t realised interest in the 18th century in general and Thieves Cant in particular was so widespread. Let me know if there’s anything else you’d particularly like me to add to the site.

I’ve added a new source of cant terms from the Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux published in 1819. Vaux was an English criminal transported to New South Wales in the early 19th century. At the end of his memoirs he includes a glossary of some 700 cant terms.

Vaux’s list overlaps with the material I currently have in the database but contains quite a lot that is new. I have added Vaux to the database but not yet added them to any category. However, the terms will appear in database searches with a date of 1819.

I have also added a new page discussing the sources used which might be of interest.

Thank you to everyone who has written in with feedback and suggestions. The Vaux material is a direct outcome of a suggestion of well-known lexicographer who indicated he did not wish to be quoted but whose help has been much appreciated.

A happy new year to all.

It is always nice when your site tops the google rankings for a search topic. I have a little thingie set up whereby google will tell me where I appear in various searches.

It told me that the site is #1 if you are searching for the words: so blossed beat. I checked and it was so.

Alas, that was last week. Now I am only #2 on the list. All the blossed beaters will go elsewhere.

[A bloss, by the way, is the cant term for a shop-lifter or a bully. You can find it with the cant database search.]

The Newgate Calendar Database Search is now available!

I have followed a similar format to the one for Thieves’ Cant. You can search by Names, Tagline (the punchy little one-liner provided with each entry) or by the Body Text.

I’ve had a lot of fun poking around, finding stuff I never even noticed when just reading the text. Try searching for your favourite English town in the Body Text. A surprising number of the larger ones are in there.

As always, please let me know if you find any bugs or if you have any suggestions. I’m keen to make this as useful as possible.

I’ve started a new project - this time The Newgate Calendar.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is a collection of stories about criminals and their fates. There have been various editions, the latest covering up to about 1840.

The stories are a great resource for anyone interested in the period. Although some of the stories seem to be completely made up, they are still relevant because the fiction had to be plausible and so the descriptions can be assumed to be fairly accurate.

I have extracted all the 18th century entries (over 350 of them) and put each in a separate file. Currently, they are listed in one big index but I am planning to categorise them and eventually add a database search.

There stories range from exciting to tedious. To get you started, here is one of my favourites, the story of John Smith who holds the record for least successful Highwayman of all time with a career that lasted for only a single week.

Another interesting one is the case of Ann Flynn who was convicted of theft but the court was so sympathetic to her poverty that she was only fined her a shilling, which was then paid by the jury. Although the laws were severe, it is clear that sometimes juries took matters into their own hands.

Anyway, have a browse through them. Let me know if you spot any errors - it was too big a job to do manually so I wrote a script to extract everything. Given the uneven nature of the original formatting, it is quite possible that mistakes happened.

Oh yes, and I am still working on categorising the Thieves’ Cant database. It’s slowly getting there.

It’s been a while since I last posted but there has been a lot of life happening over the last few months. I’m working on adding more Regency cant to the lists of cant terms and also building a searchable cant database. I’ll be setting all that up as soon as I can.

A few people have linked to the cant section so I hope it is being of some use. Feel free to add links from your own site.

Well, the research trip had its good bits and its not so good bits. I unfortunately wasn’t all that well in London so I managed to do less than I had hoped. Also, a remarkable amount of 18th century London just isn’t there any more. (Not surprising I guess. They had to put 19th and 20th century London somewhere).

I did manage to spend some time around Spitalfields, the district where a lot of Huguenots lived and the site of a thriving cloth industry. Christ Church Spitalfields is one of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s constructions and is pretty impressive (although bits of it got monstered during the 19th century). Spitalfields market is still in the same place but is covered over now and has no sense of history about it.

The same can be said for West Smithfield. This was once the site of a huge meat market and a hangout for thieves and rogues of all descriptions. As at Spitalfields the markets are still there (at least in part) but covered over. I didn’t spot any thieves or rogues either. In fact, it was raining and I barely saw anybody. The smart people were all inside.

Actually, that’s not completely true. I got approached by a homeless man asking for money. Thinking that any other fool out in that rain deserved support I pulled out a few coins and handed them over. It turned out to be three pounds. He was gobsmacked and told me he’d be lucky to get that much in a day normally.

We both agreed that some days you got luckier than others. But it seems to me to be pretty hard yakka when you have to spend the whole day parting people from less than three quid. It seems the streets of London still have their vagabonds and they aren’t doing it all that easy. Not that Sydneysiders have any reason to be proud in that regard but at least the weather is warmer.

We did a trip out to Framlingham Castle in East Anglia. This is an interesting place. Only the curtain walls remain of the medieval castle but inside is a poorhouse built in the late 17th century and expanded considerably in the early 18th. It was quite interesting seeing how they had to live.

It would have been hard work but on the whole a hell of a lot better than trying to stay alive in London. At least you got enough to eat, some clothes (rough but adequate) and a roof over your head. The East Anglian winds would have been chilly but you’d be indoors much of the time. Better than being homeless in London, that’s for sure.

Hopefully the next time I head over I’ll be in better nick.

Off to England in a few days where I plan to spend a couple of weeks pottering around London and researching its 18th century aspects. And maybe taking in a few non-18th century bits as well.

I’ll be mostly off the air for a while but I’ll post any interesting stuff I find when I can.

tr.v. axe
To remove ruthlessly or suddenly

The manuscript turns out to be about 25,000 words too long. Massacre time.

There is a sort of bizarre satisfaction in destroying things you have laboured to create. I always used to build sandcastles as close to the water’s edge as possible so that I could watch the tide tear them down.

Garçon, the long-handled axe, s’il vous plaît.

Spent quite a lot of time today getting this website sorted. There’s still a few style aspects I’m trying to pin down and the old 18th century data needs to be tweaked for the new style to work. Fortunately the 18th century data is stitched together with templates (my own bit of Perl programming, he said modestly) so making global changes to it won’t be hard. Mostly a matter of menus.
I’m also putting the final details together in Volume 1 of the Memoirs - re-editing the last chapter, checking a few historical details. Stuff like that.