What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

by Daniel Pool

  grouse—A small bird that lived on the moors in Scotland, hunted for sport and bearing many names. The red grouse was also known as the moor fowl or moor game, and the black grouse was also known as black game, the heath fowl or the black cock. The grouse season started on August 12 and signaled the end of Parliament and of the London “season” and the beginning of the bird shooting and fox hunting that consumed the fall and winter.

  growler—A nickname for the four-wheel coaches that competed with hansom cabs for taxi fares in the latter part of the century. The growlers were not as tippy as hansoms, carried more people and had room for luggage, but they were slower.

  gruel—A less-than-exciting dish consisting of corn, in the English sense, mixed with water or milk. It is of this food that Oliver Twist made his immortal request for “more” at the workhouse. It was a staple of institutional diets because in large quantities it was relatively cheap to prepare; the Poor Law commissioners in 1836 based their daily diet for the workhouse around a one-and-a-half-pint ration of gruel a day. It was also supposed to have medicinal properties; Dickens, for example, tells us in A Christmas Carol that Scrooge’s dismal chambers were furnished with “a little saucepan of gruel (Scrooge had a cold in his head).”

  guard chain—A chain attached to something like a watch to keep it from disappearing.

  guardians—Under the New Poor Law of 1834, each local parish or area elected a board of guardians to run the union of workhouses in the area.

  Guards—See Household Guards.

  guinea—A coin originally made of gold from Guinea that was worth twenty-one shillings and was last issued in 1813. Mrs. Yeobright in The Return of the Native has a little “box full of spade guineas” to divide between Clem and Thomasin; these were guineas that had a design like the spade on playing cards on the back. Luxury items were often priced in guineas long after the coin had stopped being minted.

  guinea fowl—A spotted, chicken-size farmyard bird.

  haberdasher—In England, a man who dealt in small personal articles like threads and needles.

  hack—A hack was a general-purpose, riding horse, i.e., not a hunter. To “hack” on a horse was to ride him along a road at an ordinary speed as opposed to racing him or using him for hunting or military purposes.

  hackney coach—A hackney coach was one that could be hired. In London, they served as taxicabs in the early part of the century. Usually they were discarded vehicles of the nobility, sometimes with the family coat of arms still on them.

  ha-ha—A landscaping device that consisted of a trench dug at some point in the view where it could not be seen unless one were very close to it. Also called a sunken fence.

  half crown—A silver English coin worth two shillings and sixpence. The amount which this coin represented was called a half a crown.

  half pay—A payment that kept military men on the active list, supposedly ready to be recalled to duty though it was often seen as a preliminary step to retirement.

  half price—A term used in connection with London theaters, where one could get in at intermission for half price.

  hammercloth—The cloth draped over the driver’s seat on a coach.

  hand—A term for a factory worker or other kind of workman. A hand was also a measurement, used in describing the height of horses, that was equivalent to four inches.

  hansom cab—The cab that everyone loved. Invented in the late 1830s, it had two wheels and the driver sat in back, so the passengers for a change got a clear view of where they were going.

  Hants.—An abbreviation for Hampshire county.

  ha’penny—A halfpenny.

  hardbake—A glazed sweet mass of almonds and sugar or molasses.

  hardtack—Biscuits for sailors.

  hare—Like rabbits, except they had bigger hind feet and less tender flesh.

  harmonium—A kind of primitive organ, worked by foot. The difference between this and similar American organs was that in the former the air was expelled and in the latter it was pulled in.

  harrow—As a verb, it described what was done to a field after it was plowed; namely, a harrow (the noun) was drawn over the field, breaking up the clumps of earth that resulted from plowing. The harrow was a frame with iron teeth in it that dug into the ground as it was pulled along.

  hartshorn—What it says it was—a deer’s antlers. Since deer antlers contained ammonia, they were ground into powder and put into bottles for use like smelling salts. Eustacia Vye is found dead in The Return of the Native and “then Thomasin, whose stupor of grief had been thrust off awhile by frantic action, applied a bottle of hartshorn to Clym’s nostrils, having tried it in vain upon the other two. He sighed. ‘Clym’s alive!’ she exclaimed.”

  harvest—The cutting of the corn crop. Corn was always “harvested,” while when hay was cut, it was said to be “made.”

  harvest home—A big feast with food and drink given by the landlord or farmer for all his workers to mark the conclusion of the corn harvest.

  hassock—Not to be confused with a “cassock.” Originally, hassocks were tufted clumps of earth and grass in swampy areas. They were brought into churches to serve as footrests and things to kneel on, and the name was transferred subsequently to manmade furniture serving the same purpose.

  English harvest home.

  hatchment—A shield bearing the coat of arms of someone who had died, displayed first on the front of their house and then in church. In Vanity Fair, Thackeray describes two “tall gloomy houses, each with a hatchment over the middle drawing-room window; as is the custom of houses in Great Gaunt Street, in which gloomy locality death seems to reign perpetual.”

  haw—The red berry of the hawthorn tree.

  haymaking—The cutting of a farm’s hay, almost always in June, so that it could be gathered and stored for the winter to feed the animals.

  heath—The heath was a kind of plant that grew in relatively unfertile soils. When a large quantity grew in one place, that piece of ground was itself referred to as a heath. The name for the plant in northern parts of England and in Scotland was “heather.”

  heather—See heath.

  heavy—In military parlance, a unit of soldiers with larger than normal weapons or other equipment was said to be heavy, the soldiers themselves being often larger than the average. The opposite, of course, was “light artillery” or “light cavalry.” There was a little-known and relatively successful Charge of the Heavy Brigade as well as the disastrous one of the Light Brigade.

  hedgerow—A row made out of a hedge, usually to serve as a barrier to keep cattle or sheep from wandering from one field to the next and often made of hawthorn trees because of their prickly, animal-discouraging properties.

  heir apparent—The heir who would inherit a property regardless of any conceivable contingency that might occur.

  heir presumptive—The heir who would inherit only if certain contingencies did not occur.

  heirloom—An article of personal property which was intended either by law or custom to descend by right to an heir along with the land that he was designated to inherit. The Eustace Diamonds concerns whether or not the gems named in the title are heirlooms.

  Hessian boots—Long boots worn by the German mercenaries who, inter alia, came over and fought the colonists during the American Revolution. The boots had a tassel on the top. They were popular in England in the early part of the 1800s.

  High Church—Before the Oxford Movement, the High Church group was simply the old-fashioned, stuffy faction within the Church of England. After the Oxford Movement, the term was applied to church members who shared the movement’s sentiments in favor of ceremony, ecclesiastical organization, and all the things that tended to make the church more like the Catholic church than like the down-home, born-again religion favored by the Evangelicals.

  high-lows—A type of lace-up boot.

  high sheriff—See sheriff.

  Hilary term—Hilary was a fourth-century bishop of Poitiers who got himsel
f an English feast day on January 13, which feast day in turn gave its name to university and law terms.

  hip—A fruit of a rose, especially the dog rose’s red berry.

  hiring fair—An annual or semiannual fair held in rural areas at which people hired servants and farm laborers. Gabriel Oak goes to such a fair after his sheep are killed to seek work as a farm bailiff and—when no one wants a bailiff—as a shepherd. His donning of the shepherd’s smock frock and making himself a crook to find employment was typical; servants customarily wore distinctive articles of clothing at such fairs so as to make clear the type of position for which they were seeking employment. Hiring fairs were also called “statute fairs” or “mops.”

  His Grace—Form of address used in writing to a duke.

  hob—The place at the side of a grate where one could put things like kettles to keep them warm.

  hobbledehoy—A young man or boy in the awkward stage of adolescence.

  hobby horse—A particular crotchet or obsession. Also the name given to silly would-be bicycles popular during the Regency that were moved by pushing one’s feet along the ground.

  hock—German white wine produced at Hockheim.

  Hodge—A broken-down form of “Roger,” used in a contemptuous or amused way to designate a rural laborer. Maggie Tulliver’s silly mother decides to try a stratagem to rescue the family from its desperate financial straits; “imagine a truly respectable and amiable hen,” says George Eliot, “by some portentous anomaly, taking to reflection and inventing combinations by which she might prevail on Hodge not to wring her neck or send her and her chicks to market.”

  hogshead—A measure of liquid equal to 521/2 gallons.

  holland—A type of clothing made out of linen. Brown holland, a heavier variety, was a favorite material in which to wrap up furniture and the like when one was away from a house for a while. It was also used as a floor covering.

  holly—It was favored for Christmas because, as an evergreen, it kept its bright green leaves and red berries.

  home counties—Kent, Essex, Surrey, and Middlesex; that is, the counties closest to London, sometimes also including Hertford and Sussex.

  Home Rule—A proposal to get the English out of the Irish government and let it be governed by a native Parliament. The proposal caught on in national politics in the 1870s.

  home secretary—More properly, the secretary of state for home affairs. The man in charge of dealing with domestic matters, as opposed to the foreign secretary. The home secretary was in charge of law and order and thus ran the prisons and Scotland Yard. He heard pleas for criminals to be pardoned; at the end of Far from the Madding Crowd a petition to him results in the commutation of Boldwood’s death sentence for shooting Sergeant Troy to life imprisonment. For some unfathomable reason, the home secretary also passed on the eligibility of persons wishing to vend milk from their cows in St. James’s Park.

  homestead—A home, especially a farm, with its surrounding buildings.

  Hon.—See Honourable.

  Honourable—A title used for all members of Parliament. It was also a “courtesy title,” that is, one not accompanied by any legal rights, bestowed on all children of viscounts and barons and on the younger sons of earls. Often abbreviated “Hon.” Not to be confused with Right Honourable, which would be used by a cabinet member (and any other member of the Privy Council), an earl, viscount or baron, and a peer’s eldest son bearing an inferior title of his father’s as a courtesy title.

  hop—A climbing vine picked in September whose product was used to flavor beer.

  horn—Various objects were made in whole or in part out of animal horns for many years, chief among them the “inkhorn” and the panes of the kind of lantern carried by Christian Cantle in The Return of the Native, which as he walks disturbs “moths and other winged insects, which flew out and alighted upon its horny panes.” On the fateful night his hoard is stolen, we learn of Silas Marner returning through the night to his cottage “with a horn lantern in his hand.” The practice of making the opaque side panels of lanterns from horn was known, of course, to Shakespeare, whose Moonshine in A Midsummer Night’s Dream lifts his rustic lantern aloft, proclaiming, “This lanthorn doth the horned moon present.”

  hornpipe—Originally not a nautical dance at all but merely an old English folk dance done to a horn, usually by one person.

  horse pistol—A big pistol carried, unsurprisingly, while riding a horse.

  Horse Guards—The cavalry who guarded the monarch as part of the Household troops. They were nicknamed the “Blues,” and their barracks in Whitehall became the headquarters of the whole army, so that “the Horse Guards” came to be used as an instance of metonymy, like “the Pentagon.”

  hosier—A socks and stockings maker.

  hostler—a/k/a “ostler.” He took care of the horses of travelers at inns.

  house—A colloquial term for the workhouse. Sometimes also used by a sheriff’s officer to designate a sponging house when arresting a debtor, as when Pip is arrested for debt at the end of Great Expectations. “ ‘You had better come to my house,’ said the man. ‘I keep a very nice house.’ ”

  housebreaking—Breaking into a house during the daytime to steal something or commit some other felony. Breaking into a house at night was called burglary.

  Horse Guards.

  Household—The royal household or the servants and staff who looked after the royal family. The three top officials were the lord chamberlain, the lord steward and the master of the horse. When Victoria became monarch, the female attendants—led by the mistress of the robes, and her subordinates, the ladies of the bedchamber and the maids of honour—became more important. Such household posts were sought after by high-ranking women and were expected to be awarded by a new prime minister to relatives of members of his party; Lady Glencora Palliser seeks the post of mistress of the robes from her husband. The Household Troops (also known as the Guards) were the army units who by custom were supposed to protect the sovereign. They consisted of the Life Guards and Royal Horse Guards (both cavalry) and the Grenadier, Scots and Coldstream Guards (the so-called Foot Guards or infantry).

  householder—A person who occupied a house or other dwelling and was therefore legally eligible under various circumstances to vote.

  housekeeper—The top-ranking female servant in a household. She typically hired and fired all the housemaids and made sure they did their work, in addition to which she made household preserves and often supervised the ordering of the food. She was always addressed as “Mrs.” whether she were married or not, and generally, like the butler, had her own workroom in which to hold court, gossip, and transact business, and she was rarely without her chain of keys.

  housemaid—The maid who did the dirty work of keeping the house cleaned and the bedrooms supplied with water and heat. She carried water up and down stairs for baths, emptied and washed slop basins, cleaned out the grates and polished them, turned down beds, and washed the floors and cleaned the halls, dining room, drawing room, etc., as well. Having a housemaid was probably the next step up for most households from having just a maid-of-all-work. There was a recognized syndrome called “housemaid’s knee” that resulted from kneeling on the floors and constantly scrubbing them to get them clean.

  housewife (pronounced “huzzif”)—A small case for carrying around little clothes-mending items like needles and thread. Sometimes spelled “huswife.”

  hulks—Notable for their role in Great Expectations. They were old ships pressed into use in 1776 as supposedly “temporary” floating prisons, but they were not abolished until 1858. They were located at Woolwich, the Medway, and Portsmouth harbor.

  hundred—An ancient English unit of government, being the unit next down from a shire.

  hundredweight—A measure of weight equal to 112 pounds and abbreviated cwt.

  hunt—The verb was used generally only to apply to fox hunting. (To go after rabbits, pheasant, grouse, partridge, and other game wit
h a gun was always spoken of as “shooting.”) The “hunt” as an entity was the local group of sportsmen organized for the purpose of fox hunting.

  hunter—A horse that had been bred specifically for fox hunting.

  huntsman—The man at a hunt who controlled the dogs and kept them on the scent.

  hurdler—A maker of hurdles.

  hurdles—Pens or enclosures made from lashed together sticks. They were often used to pen sheep into an area overnight on fields that needed manuring. After the sheep performed each night, the hurdles would be moved the next day to a new location. This would be done until the entire area to be fertilized had been sheep plopped.

  hussars—A kind of light cavalryman, originally in the Hungarian army. By the 1800s a hussar in the English army was simply a cavalryman who wore a rather flamboyant kind of uniform.

  hustings—The platforms from which, until 1872, candidates for Parliament addressed the voters.

  huswife—See housewife.

  Hyde Park—Located in the West End, the 388-acre park was the most fashionable in London and was where the cream of London society promenaded on their horses to see, to be seen, and gossip. Park Lane, the street on its eastern border, was the most fashionable address in London.

  imperial gallon—Virtually the same as a regular gallon. The term “imperial” was used starting in the 1820s to designate the officially adopted uniform system of weights and measures that replaced the hodge-podge of different standards that had been used in the country in a less systematic age.

  impropriate—When tithes went to a layman, as opposed to a clerical body.

  incumbent—The clergyman occupying a living.

  indentures—The documents signed by an apprentice and master when the former agreed to work for—or be “bound” to—the latter. Identical copies of the contract were made on the same piece of paper; it was then torn along a jagged, toothlike (“dentures”) edge, leaving each party with a copy that—when fitted together with the other—would prove that it could only have been the counterpart of that one other piece of paper. Hence its name. Indentures were said to be “canceled” when an apprentice was released from them.